churchofchai

OSX Snow Lepard and Sendmail/postfix woes

2010-08-17T12:44:00.000-07:00

Getting sendmail to work on OSX is a bit of a nuisance since its seems instructions are different on every version of 10.x. On 10.6 (snow leopard), it's finally a simple process:

sudo portfix start|stop

Simple.

Installing Drush on Macports

2010-03-06T07:13:00.001-08:00

Getting drush (the Drupal shell) to work on macports is a bit of a pain due to the php5/php52 conflict issue. Here's what I had to go through to get it to work:

$ sudo port install drush

---> Computing dependencies for drushError: Unable to execute port: Can't install php52 because conflicting ports are installed: php5

Before reporting a bug, first run the command again with the -d flag to get complete output.

$ sudo port deactivate php5

$ sudo port install drush

$ sudo port deactivate php52

$ sudo port activate php5

$ sudo pear install Console_Table-1.1.3

$ drush

Xdebug requires Zend Engine API version 220090115.

The Zend Engine API version 220090626 which is installed, is newer.

Contact Derick Rethans at http://xdebug.org for a later version of Xdebug.

/opt/local/libexec/drush/includes/table.inc: Permission denied

Drush needs a copy of the PEAR Console_Table library in order to [error]

function, and the attempt to download this file automatically failed.

To continue you will need to download the 1.1.3 package from

http://pear.php.net/package/Console_Table, extract it, and copy the

Table.php file into Drush's directory as

/opt/local/libexec/drush/includes/table.inc.

Drush could not execute. [error]

$ sudo cp /opt/local/PEAR/Console/Table.php /opt/local/libexec/drush/includes/table.inc

$ drush

Why the long silence?

2009-05-23T23:54:00.001-07:00

I've been tumble-blogging over at churchofchai.tumblr.com, and that was actually more fun and less work for a bit. I'll be back here in a little while tho' i think.

An Incredible Story

2008-11-03T07:02:00.001-08:00

Be sure to read this story to the end...it's well worth the read and to forward to all those who you feel deserve the thought.....

AN INCREDIBLE STORY

In 1986, Peter Davies was on holiday in Kenya after graduating from Northwestern University .

On a hike through the bush, he came across a young bull elephant standing with one leg raised in the air. The elephant seemed distressed, so Peter approached it very carefully.

He got down on one knee, inspected the elephants foot, and found a large piece of wood deeply embedded in it. As carefully and as gently as he could, Peter worked the wood out with his knife, after which the elephant gingerly put down its foot. The elephant turned to face the man, and with a rather curious look on its face, stared at him for several tense moments. Peter stood frozen, thinking of nothing else but being trampled. Eventually the elephant trumpeted loudly, turned, and walked away. Peter never forgot that elephant or the events of that day.

Twenty years later, Peter was walking through the Chicago Zoo with his teenaged son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked over to near where Peter and his son Cameron were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Peter, lifted its front foot off the ground, then put it down. The elephant did that several times then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man.

Remembering the encounter in 1986, Peter could not help wondering if this was the same elephant. Peter summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing, and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Peter legs and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly.

Probably wasn't the same elephant.

This is for all of my friends who send me those BS heart-warming stories.

Ok, now that I've managed to piss everyone off .. yeah, it's fake and I just had to do it!! :) Now I'm ready to be stoned for my sins :)

Indians "Deeply Love" Bush

2008-09-30T09:02:00.001-07:00

With the signing of the US-India nuclear deal just days away, it is time to demolish all those Gandhi statues disfiguring Indian streets and squares and to adopt a new idol.

Given the Indian population the title is more appropriate for other reasons

Obama and McCain are negative, but the devil's in the details

2008-09-28T17:14:00.001-07:00

I'm pissed that Obama's going negative.

The "media" has recently been given to saying that Obama runs 77% negative ads vs. McCain's 56%. Given that the last few emails I've received from the Obama campaign have been pretty damn idiotic (using Karl Rove as an information source?!) I tended to agree that Obama's been having dinner with Cheney and Co.

Turns out the truth is far more interesting:
Op Ad: Obama More Negative Than McCain?

The really annoying thing here is that it took me 30 minutes of research to figure out whether there's anything real to the 77% number. This US politics thing really is a PITA!!

Ay-rab's are takin over Mayricuh

2008-09-27T11:44:00.003-07:00

I'm not sure if that should come first or this:

MD5's and OSX

2008-09-22T08:12:00.001-07:00

Sucks that I have to keep looking this one up, so here's the one-liner:


$ md5 file-name | grep md5sum

If the checksum is returned in the next line, things are good. Otherwise not so much.

Constructive sentences

2008-09-14T08:09:00.001-07:00

Le Shrub proved that there's no reason to be able to construct a coherent sentence to get the job of ruling the ~~morons~~ ~~free world~~ US.

But Sarah Palin takes the cake. She's able to construct sentences, but it's sentences that are made by the construction company which decided that you can use caulk and duct-tape and nails and a compressor and a few rebars and zipties and a heat gun and a nail-screwer-thingie and a battery operated whizziewhig to build a sky-scraper. It's exactly like building with a diablo or lego set, but just a bit more sturdy.

It's impressive that she remembered words from talks (Abraham Lincoln?!) and managed to string them together in grammatically correct sentences. Too bad they still make no sense.

wiki-fication

2008-05-07T21:54:00.001-07:00

The last 2 corporate (or pseudo-corporate) gigs that I did were SORELY in need of a common documentation interface, and my solution was the wiki. The first involved a slightly uphill battle. Come to think of it I shouln't even call it a battle. It was more like an unexpected upheaval. It started off with SharePoint, and my implementation of MediaWiki turned out to be more popular. The second used Trac. The success of that project is still being weighed. I think it's a failure because I did not do the legwork necessary to make people aware of the benefits and also did not structure it correctly.

I wish I had had the series of lectures from http://ikiw.org/21days before I started, but I completely concur with the suggestions. In any case, every corporate wiki implementer should go through these videos:

world changing

2008-03-16T11:58:00.001-07:00

i'm curious, in the confused and exhausted state that i'm in, what few points i would consider to be necessary to change the world. here's a brief list that i'll be evaluating under more lucid conditions:

* legalize drugs
* legalize sex-work
* remove merit from education (i.e. don't delineate based on test performance)
* make all education free - at all levels
* require all education curricula to include farming
* require a foreign language (and that should exclude english in relevant locations)
* make all education wiki-based - so students can write their own textbooks
* put all political and public information online (wikileaks, sunlight foundation)
* make all religions pay tax (i.e. no tax benefits for contributions to religious charities)

that's my list of 9. i wish there was a 10th.

hope

2008-03-15T12:06:00.001-07:00

the ilugc [indian linux user's group, chennai] have been having perl programming sessions at the workplace. they've been progressively declining in terms of attendence, and progressively evolving in terms of the quality of presentation and focus of the attendees.

today i spent a lot of time describing my visions and aspirations - basically the ashok jhunjhunwala vision - to the attendees. trying to instill the vision and leadership that they need to contribute to society here. i was hoping to not have wasted my breath.

today one of the attendees at the end of the class said he was very glad to hear my insights because he had never thought about his programming career as having opportunities for the local population. he had only thought about programming for programming's sake. this person works for jhunjhunwala's company.

i'm thrilled that he gave me this feedback.
and sad that jhunjhunwala has not instilled the vision into his own employees.

but i have hope (outside of the usual gymkhana club stupidity, which i feel is going to crop up regularly until i leave india).

dreams, fantasies and visions [continued from last post]

2008-03-15T12:00:00.001-07:00

if you have not read the last post, pls read it.

yeah, it has nothing to do with this one, but still, might give you some perspective :)

of india's 1 000 000 000+ people almost 50% are under 30 (i can't remember where i read this, but let's assume it's true for now). this is an astounding figure. over 500 MILLION youngsters. it's either damn scary or damn useful, depending on how you look at it.

there are some downsides to it right off:
* there's a massive imbalance between men and women
* income disparities are huge
* education disparities are excessive

of the three the only real problem, at least as i see it, is the first issue - the gender imbalance is going to either result in war, or some other kind of political unrest unless men have a useful outlet. and that has to be driven by leadership and vision.

this brings me to the the other two points. provided the proper vision (and the corresponding leadership) i believe they are will take care of themselves. people are willing to work for very little - as can be seen by the web 2.0 revolution. they also can accomplish a great deal with their own self-effort given minimal education. see all the dot-com heroes. life in india is cheap enough to allow people to pursue their visions with minimal renumeration, provided they see the long-term potential.

if vision and leadership can be provided to the unwashed multitudes - the youth who have the energy, the drive and the ambition - i believe this nation has the ability to change the world. without vision and the associated leadership we're doomed to repeat the mistakes of previous empires, regimes and institutions.

today i have high hopes that i can contribute to putting the seeds of change into the mindsets of a few of the youth here.

but i fear that my optimism may be short-lived since the simultaneity of opportunity and fascist adherence to the idiocies of a bygone era are too apparent. specifically my previous rant about institutional ignorance such as that found at the "gymkhana club" (and their dress code) vs the recognition by youth here that there are possibilities for them to create magic that meets the needs of the current populance. i don't know if the youthful exuberance and desire to create magic can fight the bureaucracy-adled stupidity of incoherent and irrelevant rules which are going to be instilled on the youth - to make them kow-tow to those who decide how things need to work.

i realize this all sounds vague and distracted. i need to digest my ideas into something more concrete.

70 hrs and counting

2008-03-14T06:01:00.001-07:00

my average work week since jan 1st has been 70 hrs per week. the last time i clocked that kind of hourage was back in the late 90's when i was young and stupid. my body does not appear to be able to deal with this kind of abuse any more.

i've long held that productivity decreases past the 35hr per week mark. i believe i have managed to conclusively verify this in my case, and in the case of people around me. at the very least efficiency drops dramatically after the 35hr mark. i think people can still get things done, but it's at a diminishing rate of return.

i have a chance right now to reflect on what i've accomplished (and not) over the last 2-3 months and here's the short list:

a) accomplishments:
* installed and running openfiler - need to get it ha'ed and clustered for full reliability
* running trac, and have customized it to some degree. need to hack it some more.
* running openHRM, which is just barely acceptable, and needs lots of hacking to make it a usable hr system.
* running subversion, and have the in-house developers using it regularly.
* running rsync to do regular mirrored backups, but this is still a far cry from ha!

b) failures:
* versioning-integrated filesystem. i had high hopes that i could have this implemented, but the lack of a high-capacity data storage system has hindered this extensively. i'm hopefully going to have collabnet help me with this.
* automated ftp synchronization. this is at most a 2-day programming task. that's if i had 2 days of non-distracted development time. which i've not.
* building a better rdf/html comparison tool
* automating the processing of image files to different sizes and resolutions. this is really a *very* simple job given the power of imagemagick

one of the things that i should have (but have not) added to the "accomplishments" side is instilling vision. i realized today that this specific function can never be underestimated. all workers, whether they be programmers, drones, whatever, need to have a vision of something greater that they are striving for. they cannot continue to do the mindless repetitive tasks that we ask of them day-to-day without the golden light at the end of the dismal dank tunnel. in many cases the tunnel ends up being the end itself - and people get dejected and decide that they just can't take it any more and quit.

this is basically the reason i've quit the last 3 jobs i've had. i did not get the sense that the person above me had the vision of doing something great that i could strive for.

i have been working on instilling a vision of what's capable in the current field i'm working in (e-publishing to be sufficiently vague) into some of the employees. i have 2 successes in spite of having spewed my spit at over a dozen. i think this is a high response rate :)

i know that this is of value because one of the guys, saravanan, came to me today and talked to me about the vision he has for automating certain processes which we spend inordinate amounts of time doing right now. and he kept grinning about what he referred to as my "dreams" of what we could accomplish. i'm quite confident that these dreams are well within achievable reality within the next 9 months. then i gave him an inkling into the real "dream", which i currently still consider fantasy, that i was aiming for. that got him very very excited, and i think it lit a spark in him to go create something amazing.

this leads me to my next post ...

catalyst mvc reducks on osx

2008-03-10T11:02:00.001-07:00

Yeah, I'm back at hacking MVC after having blogged abut it over a year back. I tried the Rails and I lorved, but didn't have much of a chance to muck with it. Turns out that Perl, though icky in many respects syntactically, is just more prevalent and the user-base is just that much more active than Ruby. Seemingly.

Anyway, now I need to build a quick and dirty and maintainable (ha, oxymoron in most cases) database app that's web-connected for my current gig. It'll have to be maintained by mostly non-techies. So I'm thinking MVC is a necessity. The few techies who *can* work on maintenance duties are self-taught Perl "programmers". Note the quotes, and keep Chris Farley in mind.

Building Catalyst for OSX (my OS of choice at present, when my Ubuntu host is not available) is turning out to be much more of a nightmare than building a rails app ever was. The standard issue:

perl -MCPAN -e 'install Catalyst;'

bombed with many errors. Then I found out that macports had a lot of this already port'ed, so to speak. Doing some

sudo port install p5-catalyst-*

should have made for a lot of happy-happy-joy-joy (which, incidentally, dates me), but it too fails with silliness like:

Error: Target org.macports.activate returned: Image error: /opt/local/bin/corelist already exists and does not belong to a registered

So, I'm currently debating whether to continue the struggle to make this work, or just give up. Obviously I'm not going to give up, but this really is unfortunate. Why the HELL does it have to be so hard to install something like this? I'm trying to figure out if Apple is to blame, Catalyst is wonky, or my machine is just so mucked up with all the crap I've been installing that things are just totally out of whack.

Now it seems that the fact that I installed some of the modules using CPAN and the rest using macports is actually causing some confusion to one or the other (I guess their databases aren't too intelligent). So I'm having to encounter errors, then continue installation in spite of the snafu's and I'm hoping that this ultimately leads to an actually working install!

In any case, this is what I'm going to be having upleasant dreams about tonight!

catalyst mvc reducks on osx

2008-03-10T10:55:00.001-07:00

perl -MCPAN -e 'install Catalyst;'

bombed with many errors. Then I found out that macports had a lot of this already port'ed, so to speak. Doing some
sudo port install p5-catalyst-*

should have made for a lot of happy-happy-joy-joy (which, incidentally, dates me), but it too fails with silliness like:
Error: Target org.macports.activate returned: Image error: /opt/local/bin/corelist already exists and does not belong to a registered

So, I'm currently debating whether to continue the struggle to make this work, or just give up. Obviously I'm not going to give up, but this really is unfortunate. Why the HELL does it have to be so hard to install something like this? I'm trying to figure out if Apple is to blame, Catalyst is wonky, or my machine is just so mucked up with all the crap I've been installing that things are just totally out of whack.

In any case, this is what I'm going to be having upleasant dreams about tonight!

duct tape - not so universal after all

2008-03-10T10:30:00.001-07:00

ran into a cultural idioma problem 2 days back. there's no such thing as duct-tape in india. that's mainly because there's very little duct-work in india. why do you need duct-tape if you don't have duct-work, right?

obviously those familiar with the universal applicability of aforementioned tape will disagree with that statement. i mean we need duct-tape to build everything - and duct-work is just the least of it!

so anyhoots, there's no duct-tape in india, so what the heck do u use as an allegory when you standard issue "it's like duct-tape" just falls on blank stares? i'm stumped. i thought maybe fevicol or cello-tape, but it's just not the same, now is it?!

btw, just for the record, i'm no longer a fan of the duct-tape. i have joined the legions of hackers who have sworn allegiance to the gorilla vs the duck, and i'm not looking back (even at $8/roll, which is just crippling).

moment of inter-zen

2008-03-07T16:52:00.001-08:00

i've had a vision of what can be done with truly searchable video for a few years now, ever since i heard about the fraunhoffer institute's idea to create mp7 (i believe it was around 2000 or 1999, but can't recall exactly). one example scenario:
imagine being able to create a storyline, in text, and have it dynamically generate different video streams. take, for example, the outline: "children playing; sunset in calcutta; beach hawkers; calcutta street". imagine being able to stipulate this sequence, and have it directly translate to video segments which can be spliced together. take that one step further and imagine that this outline can create hundreds of different video streams - all from different cinematographers.
this is the first in a long list of uber-cool ideas surrounding a project called pad.ma. their about page states that they:

.. see PAD.MA as a way of opening up a set of images, intentions and
effects present in video footage, resources that conventions of video-
making, editing and spectatorship have tended to suppress, or leave
behind. This expanded treatment then points to other, political
potentials for such material, and leads us into lesser-known
territory for video itself... beyond the finite documentary film or
the online video clip.

Dense annotation is the key to making this happen - and this has been an elusive idea in video. it's even more elusive in audio. at least our contextual perception of video and text is similar. audio and text are entirely separate beasts that really need to have more work done to bridge the gap.

pad.ma is developed by 2 german hackers working with the alternative law forum, and a friend of ilya's and lawrence's (sanjay). the moment of zen here for me is that pad.ma is something i've been thinking about for a while, and ilya told me about it and i found out that it was an alf project, and told lawrence how cool it is, and lawrence forwarded by email to sanjay, who is a pal of ilya's and so just as sanjay was asking lawrence how to get in touch with me ilya's sending sanjay my contact information!

should be interesting to see how pad.ma is coded, since it'll all be released under CC/GPL.

Fwd: Sexy for President - quite funny!

2008-02-29T19:35:00.001-08:00

My friend Vidhya wrote this - its totally hilarious!

People of Texas, I beseech you; please bring sexy back on March 4th.

VOTE OBAMA.

Most of you will agree that the last 7 years of the Bush administration have been a constant barrage of UGLY. This is just a sampling of the hideousness that we have all had to endure:

Bush – I had to stop watching the news because of this man. With his beady eyes and forked tongue poking out behind his short teeth – what, about this man's coke binge smile, inspires confidence?

Rumsfeld the crypt keeper – I swear I saw Voldermort materialize from
the back of his head during a press conference.

Laura, the patronizing host of her own 50s Christmas special – does any one else think she couldn't be that bad if they didn't drug her before show time?

Rove and his 40 vibrating chins – the more excited he gets, the faster they go. You could probably play his chins like they do half filled glasses of water. His chins could play "you're a mean one Mr. Grinch" during Laura's Christmas show.

Then there's Cheney – dear grotesque Cheney. I imagine Cheney subsists on hunks of pork fat that he keeps in his panic room.

There ain't a salvageable face in the bunch.

Whether or not you like Bill Clinton, you have to admit that he had sex appeal. No doubt he had a passion for policy and a command over the English language, which no one would ever say about Bush. But what made him truly lovable was the fact that whether he was talking about
genocide or Medicare, he had that beguiling grin of a man who has just been blown. He had presence and confidence and something in his eye, perhaps his interviewer's cleavage, made me want to believe in him. It seems that the majority of the world feels the same way because from
San Paolo to Tokyo, people love bubba. He even has his own tree at the Gandhi memorial. Incidentally Kennedy, our last sexy president before Bill, also has a tree there. Maybe the Indians know something we don't.

Sadly for Hillary, she doesn't have any sex appeal of her own. Hillary has done wonders with a good haircut and wide-leg pants. She is Bill's equal if not superior as a policy wonk. But nothing about her makes you want to drop your pants and listen to her espouse the benefits of
her 453 point universal health care plan. And no stylist can make that stiff smile hide her lack of a discernable personality.

That leaves all of you McCain voters. I ask you to think about this.

Imagine for the next four years you have to stare at his horribly misshapen face with that giant goiter coming of his cheek mimicking everything he says a half second after he says it? It's just creepy.

This brings me to my point. When I get bad news, I always feel better about it when someone sexy is giving it to me. Wouldn't it be much better to have Obama's nice broad smile beaming at you while he tells you that we are in a recession? He is charming and witty and has the
ability to cut through the bullshit to get to the heart of the matter. But if you are still undecided, think about this. Here is a man who looks good in a suit and has nice teeth. He probably smells nice too. I might stop hurling things at the T.V. if it was Obama instead of shrub telling me that we were going to be in Iraq for another 50 years. And as a bonus, we also get Michelle Obama.

My mind was made up when I saw her walk across the stage in that red bell-sleeved outfit.
That girl can work a dress. Again, don't underestimate the importance of style. Would the world have been as mesmerized by Jackie O had she looked like a shriveled up tampon – no offense Nancy Reagan. You can never underestimate the importance of being sexy when you are
trying to win over your enemies. I wonder if Sharon wouldn't have liked Arafat more if he didn't look like he had a colony of mice in his beard. Arafat too might have been more pleasant if Sharon didn't waddle into a room like he had eaten several Palestinians for breakfast. Who knows, we might all live in a different world today if these fools had a stylist.

Our next president is going to be inheriting a dangerous and uncertain future. It is up to us to make sure that s/he is equipped with the one thing that can really make a difference – sex appeal.

Bring Sexy Back this Tuesday. VOTE OBAMA!!!

deep choices

2008-02-02T10:28:00.001-08:00

i've been given the choice to provide education for a kid with a lot of potential. he's currently working a gig which disallows him from pursuing the studies that he is very interested in. he's an amazing worker, has outstanding skills already, a great disposition, and is a self-starter. he'll be virtually impossible to replace. so ... do i give him the education he so richly deserves? or do i allow him to continue working (and possibly learning a lot less, yet earning a hell of a lot more) because i'm afraid of how hard it'll be to replace him?

i'm going to have to think about this one for a while - i thought the answer would be obvious, but it's not. at least not to me!

a better school than most

2008-01-31T07:18:00.001-08:00

I think I just read about the coolest school in the world. Schooling in India was a pathetic, moronic and altogether blighted endeavor. I think I learned almost nothing at most of the schools I attended, except for The School, part of the Theosophical Society, or the Krishnamurthy Foundation of India. The open nature of the education was really what made me realize what a school is supposed to be about: learning. Not proving that you're not as stupid as the teachers think you are. Or beating other students out and getting recognition for knowing the 10 use of dry ice. Or getting better grades so that you can prove that you're sufficiently qualified to join the teeming workforces that consider a job to be more important that seeing different aspects of their own country.

All that aside, I just read about a school that better The School in every way. I just read about it here: Mutiny.in » The School that “Anna” built

Here's just a taste of the purpose of the school. In order to be admitted:

the child has to be a juvenile delinquent with a police record and
relevant papers or some one who has failed more than once in the same
class. The idea is not that children who are excelling should be
enrolled and the institution’s stature elevated but that children whom
society in one way or the other has discarded should be taken in hand
and reformed

My kind of place! I unfortunately don't qualify for any of these requirements, but without a doubt the graduates of this institution are going to change the world. The tried to in their own way, and managed to break "traditions" and "customs" to such a degree that attempts were made to rectify them.
I laud their work, and wish there were more institutions like it to help our society (especially the Indian one) become better.

Dressing in Code

2008-01-26T07:48:00.000-08:00

Dressing in Code

I had the pleasure of visiting the Gymkhana Club of Chennai thanks to a good friend of mine who is a long-time member (who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent), on Jan 25th 2008. They had a very entertaining Republic Day celebration of talented modern dancers in a quite pleasant outdoor setting. Apparently the Gymkhana Club always does their celebrations one day prior to the actual event. So in this case the Republic Day celebration fell on the 25th for the anticipated 26th event. And those of you who know the place know that it's pretty nice. And those of you who don't, you'd better go down your rolodex and find a Gymkhana-member so that you can be their guest and go experience the place. It's a historical Chennai institution.

Unfortunately, as a prefix to said nice event, I managed to cause my host a minor (and he says truly minor) embarrassment by unintentionally infracting one of the club's rules right at the get-go. As we were entering the main building, one of the [presumably] managers accosted us with a "sir we have a dress code". This individual unapologetically stated that they required collars on all guests. I obviously made the assumption that his mis-statement really applied only to those of us blemished with an XY chromosome since the fairer sex generally dresses better in spite of the lack of a collar.

Now I'm a naturally argumentative person. I'm the sort of guy who'll argue with a clerk for telling me that I can't take photographs in a department store or a museum (I was thrown out of both for this infraction). But given that I had been invited by someone for dinner at a pretty swank place I decided to just throw in a cursory question. I asked the aforementioned Gymkhana Club Manager (alleged) if Nehru collars did not count. I guess I should now provide some details on my attire for clarification's sake. I was dressed in standard-issue Bata sandals (damn comfy at Rs. 250), a pair of excellent Just Casuals linen pants, and a white short-sleeved Nehru-collared Khadi shirt from the Khadi Gramodyog Bhavan next to Ritchie Street. This latter accoutrement was, as you must have astutely gathered by now, the offending item.

I've been accused of being an idiot on several occasions (actually pretty much daily), but my questioning whether the Nehru-collar did not qualify as a collar was not because I thought it might. As a collar at least. Rather the question really came up because I thought the manager might see the irony of his statement about their dress-code about a Khadi shirt (and it's a very obvious Khadi shirt since nobody else makes these white shirts except the KGB - hmm, interesting abbreviation that, but we'll ignore it for now) in light of it being worn to their Republic Day celebrations. Republic Day ... transitioning from British Dominion ... freedom from the oppressor, etc. Yeah, I know, you get the picture.

So I asked the question and got the standard issue "we've got a dress code and collars are required", upon which some unfortunate individual was made to run off and find a suitable shirt that would cover my embarrassment. If you've never been in this position, let me give you a taste. The Gymkhana club offers a fine selection of collared golf t-shirts available to wear atop your offending apparel at either a nominal laundry fee (charged, of course, to the member host), or available from their store (or so I've heard - but this is entirely hearsay). It's a wonderful piece of couture that looks like it came out of a used-clothes store. For the record, I'm not bad-mouthing used-clothing stores - I bought the best suit I've ever owned at a used-clothing store. But I was delighted to don a somewhat beaten-up, but duly collared t-shirt over my locally hand-spun and hand-made (or so they claim) nationalistic clothing.

By the way I didn't want to mention the fact that Gaultier is visiting India because of it's amazing indigenous (and arguably collar-free) textiles, but what the heck - I'll throw that bit of tangential mirch into the larger masala.

There's a saying I've heard often that it's a good thing that we kicked the Brits out so that we could govern ourselves and have our own freedoms and decision-making authorities. I used to be very sad about that since the great British institutions of dress and etiquette and food had been lost by my hapless desis. But I'm very glad to know that the really important rules, such as the dress-code which ensure that Western-style clothing is given the credit it deserves when contrasted to Indian clothes, is still maintained dutifully by such venerable institutions as the Gymkhana Club. And obviously I'm entirely humbled that a worn-out t-shirt albeit with neck accoutrement is "plus couture" contrasted against indigenous garb.

(By the way, just in case it's not clear, that's sarcasm.)

There's a reason the British (and the French and Dutch and Portuguese and Spanish and [insert your favourite colonialist here]) colonialists stopped people from wearing their own clothing to places of business, then extended it to other realms of life where people had to go regularly for socializing and networking. It's a simple and yet incredibly effective way of devaluing a national identity. I'm not suggesting that this is still the case, at least not at the Gymkhana. However to continue a tradition that was specifically designed (in my humble opinion) to diminish the value of the indigenous identity is distressing, to say the very least.

As I stated earlier, I'm the sort of guy who'll argue at the drop of a hat. As Bugs Bunny would say (if you're a Looney Toons fan) "This means War!". So I'm on a mission to ensure that my every visit to the Gymkhana Club henceforth is Khadi-shirt'ed (unfortunately my veshti skills are deplorable). But in all probability (and very unfortunately) I'll not have a chance to grace their grounds anytime soon.

In any case I'd be interested in hearing about others' experiences with the Gymkhana's policies, and of course opinions on this one.

perk'age

2008-01-18T02:24:00.001-08:00

every day there's a coffee guy who shows up with a scalding hot cup of saccharine-sweet caffeine in a demi-tasse sized paper cup. he shows up at 10am and 3pm.
initially i hated the coffee - i'm an all black sort: no sugar, no milk. this coffee is about 60% coffee, 20% milk, and 20% sugar.

today i realized that i was actually craving the coffee - i had to step away from my desk for a while and the coffee guy decided not to leave a cup in case it became too cold before i returned (now *that's* care for a product). i fortunately saw him in one of the hallways and before i could say anything he said (in tamil) - "i didn't want to leave your coffee to get cold, so i was trying to find you. if you are going back to your office i'll bring it there.".

btw, when i said this is scalding hot, i'm really not exaggerating - it's hot enough that it'll peel skin. i made the mistake of taking a rather big swig the first time and ended up with cap'n crunch mouth for a couple of days.

anyway, this is just a very nice perk to have, and i guess it's pretty standard in india, but nevertheless i'm thrilled :-)

blogs sex and india

2008-01-13T07:16:00.001-08:00

it's interesting to see that blogging is getting the sort of attention that i did not expect in india. i'm right now watching ndtv "the brave new world of blogs". it's probably a regular talk show, since the host looks very talk-show hosty. i think the name of the show is "we the people". come to think of it the episode might be about whether to regulate blogs in india.

what catches my attention is the fact that there's frank discussion by bloggers, ON TV, about homosexuality, sexuality, and many other topics generally taboo in indian "proper society" (whatever that means). i'm concerned for the bloggers to some degree, but am also very very proud that indian media is representing the borders. one thing to note is that homosexuality is illegal in india, per the constitution. obviously it's not enforced, but it's still interesting to see that people are willing to come forward and talk publicly about this.

an interesting thing that the host asked is whether this whole blogging this is just

an angrezi, chic, gen-next thing to do

strange question, but i've asked the same of many of my guests - whether blogging and free-culture translate beyond the western world. here's the answer!

most of the bloggers being talked to are young - probably late teens or early twenties at the very most. the gay guy, maybe around 20, says his parents know he's gay, but that he talks about a lot of things on his blog that he would not talk to his parents about. i suspect this is true of most bloggers. says something about blogging being cathartic, more than informative.

a question i've had for a while is whether bloggers are only the english speaking masses. the topic just turned to this, and the blogger being talked to has a blog named qarba (or garba maybe) in hindi. i could not find it doing a google search, so maybe i'll have to look again in a bit. the combination of english with hindi and other indian languages for the purpose of blogging is very cool.

the hindi blogger just said that the act of blogging is never personal. since it's in the public domain (and not in a license sense) it's by definition not private. i agree, but it's a dichotomy that needs to dealt with. due to the impersonal nature of the internet (and arguably also because of the one-directionality to some degree, ignoring comments for a sec) i suspect people are going to be more apt to port personal feelings and opinion (i know i do). but simultaneously i wonder if people ever consider just how much of their public posting might come back to bite them in the ass (question for will - have you ever had negative repercussions from blogging, aside from the whole vivo's incident?).

blogging is obviously a means to gain attention. and as the gay guy says:

what's wrong with wanting to be famous?

what indeed :)

good ole hatin of the unix

2008-01-12T10:31:00.001-08:00

i'm reading what's probably the most entertaining vitriolic invective-laden diatribe that has not been leveled against the behemoth in redmond: the unix-haters handbook. it's got such choice sentiments as:

“Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don’t think that this is a coincidence.”

and

“I liken starting one’s computing career with Unix, say as an under- graduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act.” — Ken Pier, Xerox PARC

With quotes like that what's NOT to like? This is MUST reading for anyone with any sense. And probably for everyone without, who's still not completely on the unix-hater bandwagon also.

journalistic biases

2007-12-28T05:00:00.001-08:00

i just went to news.google.com. the top story is about benazir bhutto's assassination. of the 5527 articles the first non-US coverage starts at article 60 - sify.net.

i waited 5 minutes and refreshed news.google.com to see how the spread might change. out of 1010 articles related to bhutto reuters india is now at 6, Sify at 11, NDTV at 12, Aljazeera at 13.

So in 5 minutes the world has started looking at the [more] local news outlets for more detail than the international.

this morning's time/cnn article had a picture of bush for the bhutto story (which i had screen-captured that, but alas did not). seemed somewhat indicative of the state of u.s. journalism. but then again, the ny times has a truly excellent piece (and some very good photos) of the event "bhutto is buried as pakistan reels".

america calling desmond tutu

2007-12-27T09:45:00.001-08:00

Mark Kleiman over at The Reality-Based Community: Truth and Reconciliation writes:

If a Democrat gets elected next year, he or she is going to have a
terrible hand to play. The economy is likely to be in a slowdown, with
the bad-housing-debt problem still looming. The foreign policy
situation certainly isn't going to get any better. And worst of all,
the new President will be inheriting an office discredited, and a set
of executive agencies ruined, by GWB and his fellow vandals. (read more)

I've thought about this for a while - it seems entirely ludicrous that any sane individual would wish to take on the US presidency at this time, for the reasons the article outlines. I only hope Kleiman's punchline pans out. I wonder if the US would even be capable of handling anything like the TRC when people are so polarized about the morons in power. It would be like India having a TRC to deal with the excesses of politicians - not bloody likely.

bhutto

2007-12-27T08:31:00.001-08:00

i've been getting my news on what's going on on the ground and the response to benazir bhutto's assassination from the bloggers. http://lahore.metblogs.com and http://karachi.metblogs.com has some very dedicated bloggers providing some on-the-ground info.

streets of fury

2007-12-26T19:58:00.001-08:00

every day in chennai i get into a fight or witness a fight. almost every auto trip is an argument. since autos in chennai do not go by the meter (the excuses: the meter is broken, the meter does not work, the meter does not record correctly, the prices fluctuate too much, the government is the problem) there's no easy way to determine exactly what it should cost to go to a certain place. (note to self: figure out if there's a way to get a consistent auto rate to any place in the city).
then there are the street fights. every day i witness at least one instance where people are close to coming to blows. the arguments are about silly things for the most part - there is virtually never an instance where a fight is warranted. i've found myself being dragged into fights virtually every day, even when i know that it's pointless. i fight because the testosterone in the air is too thick and i have to say my piece for fear of being downtrodden.
in every case the fights are between men. every street is choked to the hilt with men. the traffic is too much for a town this size, and the male-female ratio is unnatural.
there was a "this american life" episode a few years back about an afghani kid living in california who decided to go to afghanistan with his father when the karzai government took control. he said that every meeting he went to with his father was extremely aggressive and violent. until one day a woman walked into one of the meetings and everything calmed down.
i think it's the same situation here - there are too many men being aggressive. we need more women.
jonii said that when she went to thailand it felt amazingly pleasant and civil and people actually cared about the beauty around them. thailand has a much more balanced male-female ratio than india.
changing the status quo will require that women be held in a much higher regard than men for some time, in the same way that affirmative action was put into place. it's going to require that women be paid more than men for a period of time and given more latitude. perhaps that will never happen in a male-dominated society like india's.

fists of fury

2007-12-26T19:50:00.001-08:00

every day in chennai i get into a fight or witness a fight. every auto trip is an argument. actually maybe not every trip, but most trips are. since autos in chennai do not go by the meter (the meter is broken, the meter does not work, the meter does not record correctly, the prices fluctuate too much, and so many more excuses) there's no easy way to determine exactly what it should cost to go to a certain place.
then there are the street fights. every day i witness at least one instance where people are close to coming to blows. the arguments are about silly things for the most part - there is virtually never an instance where a fight is warranted. i've found myself being dragged into fights virtually every day, even when i know that it's pointless. i fight because the testosterone in the air is too thick and i have to say my piece for fear of being downtrodden.
in every case the fights are between men. every street is choked to the hilt with men. the traffic is too much for a town this size, and the male-female ratio is unnatural.
there was a "this american life" episode a few years back about an afghani kid living in california who decided to go to afghanistan with his father when the karzai government took control. he said that every meeting he went to with his father was extremely aggressive and violent. until one day a woman walked into one of the meetings and everything calmed down.
i think it's the same situation here - there are too many men being aggressive. we need more women.
jonii said that when she went to thailand it felt amazingly pleasant and civil and people actually cared about the beauty around them. thailand has a much more balanced male-female ratio than india.
changing the status quo will require that women be held in a much higher regard than men for some time, in the same way that affirmative action was put into place. it's going to require that women be paid more than men for a period of time and given more latitude. perhaps that will never happen in a male-dominated society like india's.

Curried pirates

2007-12-21T07:46:00.001-08:00

Pirates of the Curried Beans - The Little Theatre presents a
Christmas pantomine called 'Pirates of the Curried Beans.'

I'm bummed that I missed this. I just saw the poster for it today. Might have been cool to go to.

Curried pirates

2007-12-21T07:45:00.001-08:00

Pirates of the Curried Beans - The Little Theatre presents a
Christmas pantomine called 'Pirates of the Curried Beans.'

I'm bummed that I missed this. I just saw the poster for it today. Might have been cool to go to.

Movie madness

2007-12-21T07:39:00.001-08:00

There's a rule in Tamilnadu (and maybe in other parts of India) that movies with non-tamil words in their title are taxed, whereas tamil-only titles are not. I'm sure there's a nationalistic logic to this, and perhaps it's a way to make people cherish their "mother-tongue".
Film promotion is often in the news papers, regardless of language, so tamil films with tamil titles are promoted in English papers, transliterated. They can't translate the names .. because of the tax. So you have situations where movies are have promotional text with titles like "Muzhi" which really only make sense to those who understand Tamil.

There was a time when I was a bit of a Tamil-nationalist. I'm now realizing that language, like religion, is simply a way to keep people apart.

Culture shocks

2007-12-14T00:20:00.001-08:00

Sci-Fi Hi-Fi: PodWorks

My brother just showed up with his iPhone and all his music on it. In the eternal wisdom of DRM, Apple has made it virtually impossible to get the music that he has purchased off his iPhone to a machine that we can play the tracks at his wedding. Annoying as all hell!

I figured there MUST be some bright hacker who has figured out how to pull stuff off the iPhone, but after a 4 hour search I gave up yesterday. Then this morning I decided to give it one last shot, and I find PodWorks. These guys are freaking brilliant. And the product costs $8. Eight freaking bucks. I mean eight measly clams. It's insane how good this program is, and $8 is just a ridiculously good price. I would probably have paid $20 (not that I'm suggesting they increase their price).

I you have an iPhone or iPod you MUST get yourself this program. It's awesome. AWESOME!!!

india - land of the uncaring

2007-12-05T17:46:00.001-08:00

India’s urban planners, designers and technologists have never felt
the need to conceive a human-friendly system of managing garbage and sewage.
Instead, they rely on an unending source of disposable, cheap, Dalit labour.
Tehelka:: Free. Fair. Fearless

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airline food suckage

2007-12-02T19:41:00.001-08:00

My mealpak on Jet Lite from Delhi to Chennai felt like i was being punished with just bread and water. But I was punished with style I guess since it was 2 kinds of bread and 2 kinds of water.

Chai'ed up and ready to go

2007-12-01T19:56:00.001-08:00

Pretty much nothing like a good cup of chai first thing in the morning, even when our first thing started at 4am and the chai showed up at 8am. ach! Go to the flickr page for more pics.

what, no hell?!

2007-12-01T09:58:00.001-08:00

you know something's amiss when the only headache you get is due to carrying kefir on board at the cedar rapids security check. in fact the rest of the trip has been ridiculously easy. the food was decent (i guess american finally got the sense to contract indian veg food out to an indian company, in this case jyoti or swad or something - yes, i should have taken a picture but just was not prepared). it's nothing like the indian veg fare from the uk to india, mind you, but it was not anything to sneeeze at. markedly missing was the lack of pickle.

in any case, decent food, easy immigration, no hassle at customs, a totally uneventful taxi ride to the master paying guest house and we're now in bed with free wifi access. interestingly there's a 4-lane highway all the way to carol bagh. 4 years ago we basically drove on a 1.5-lane road through something resembling a forest between delhi and carol bagh. probably the most impressive part is the almost complete lack of touts as we exited indira gandhi international airport. either i'm just not good enough to be hassled by the taxi drivers, hotel pushers, and all the other assorted hangers-on, or something got cleaned up. but maybe we just got lucky!

i should state for the record that you know you're in india when there's pollution so thick it's like fog, and about 10 minutes into "fresh" air you have a sore throat and wish you'd been smoking more to keep the pollutants at bay. then there's the random drumming and tinny radio music that's blaring pretty much non-stop. i have no idea what it is, but there's a comfort quotient there that makes me recognize home.

anyway, we're in delhi, safe and pretty much feeling like the last 2 years in iowa have flitted by. except for the brand spankin new highway, and the monumental levels of construction we could have been here last week.

from here on there will be more pictures, i promise.

eia-wifi and tsa lurve

2007-11-30T14:24:00.001-08:00

there are very few times - really - that i get to say this, but i do love iowa. yeah, it's way out in the middle of frikkin nowhere, but i'm able to blog this thanks to the excellent people at eastern iowa airport who provide for free, that's right FREE wifi access. (in the larger love, every rest-area along iowa highways also provide free wifi - ain't that just the best?!)

in more love news, the tsa folk at cedar rapids airport are damn nice. ok, to be completely accurate half of them are damn nice. the other half play bad-cop very well, and are just annoying. as usual our bags needed to get the anal probe thanks to the 30lbs of vitamins that jonii packed. then the security checkpoint anal probe coz i forget that i had 3 oz. of hair gel, toothpaste, and jonii had half a quart of kefir.

but on the kefir note - the tsa guy who probed jonii happened to be from a foreign country (i'll leave specifics out in case a tsa gestapo individual decides to check up on all this). and he loves kefir apparently and suggested that in future she say it's for medical purposes. excellent :-) i'm glad to know that the tsa agents are not completely moronic and brain-dead. the rules are hard enough, but to have to deal with stupidity would just cinch the cake.

anyway, more at the next stop, which will prolly be delhi.

lessons: vodka + sanbiter + rj

2007-11-29T20:35:00.001-08:00

rj says that yahoo email is just gay, and that he just hates using it. yahoo has become our home of spam, and i have to agree with him. basically it's become the email for all practical purposes what we used to do with hotmail. hotmail, meanwhile, has just become the dried up turd. sterile and really not very stimulating.
on an entirely unrelated note, skype is being liked all round. even donald likes skype. all the other chat bullshit is just way to goddam cheesy!

so if we had to put all these up into the fairfield context,
yahoo is like paradiso - the yuppie, yahoo thing. we want to love them, and the potatoes are great on sunday, but the rest of the experience you really don't want to have anything to do with.
2nd street is what we really want - a good dose of consistent mediocrity. but it's sort of like lycos/mailcity maybe. you're not completely annoyed, and it works pretty well. not a dive, and it has some personality. but you want to take a shower after you're done. it's like walking into archie bunker's place. or maybe mel's diner.
but it seems like in the grand coffee scheme of things we still await something on par with google.

so that's what we're in search of - the google of coffee places.

this is the sort of thing you end up discussing when you mix san pellegrino chinotto, sanbitter and ketel one.

ted sorensen is da man!

2007-11-25T10:17:00.001-08:00

i got a chance to watch ted sorenson on c-span's broadcast from the kennedy school a couple of days back, and was hoping to be able to post the show via youtube (but alas youtube appears to be down as of this writing). i never knew sorensen was the force behind kennedy's (that's the president, not the school) speeches. the interview, conducted by jim leach, made me realize just how far down the crapper the US has sunk. to hear sorensen and his thinly veiled digust for the current administration (and pretty much every administration since kennedy's) said much to me about a different class of public servants back in the 60's.
one thing that kept coming up is that sorensen was only 34 when he was charged with writing some of the most important speeches in recent american history (the 13-day war, bay of pigs, kennedy's inaugural address). sorensen himself is somewhat incredulous that he was given this sort of responsibility.
the speech also brings up the craziness of the politics of the time, which closely mirrors what's going on today. dean atkinson (sp?) was jfk's guy who delivered the letters to kruschev. basically he was a very heavy hawk and if he had had his way there would have been nuclear war.
[btw, youtube is back now - so down for 20 minutes! - 12.10p CST]
sorensen says during the interview that kennedy's ability to provide a way for kruschev to not lose face when confronted with the turkey missile issue was instrumental in allowing for a peaceful end to the cuban missile crisis.

-- update: you can download the talk: as a quicktime, mp3, wmv or real file at

youtube is down?!

2007-11-25T09:57:00.001-08:00

as of 11.50am 11/25/07 youtube appears to be down where i am (in fairfield iowa, on mediacom cable). ping responds just fine, but i get

http/1.1 Service Unavailable
from all browsers. there's a theory at the churchofchai that this is because of the youtube republican debate tonight, and the nefarious powers that be have caused youtube to be hoserized.

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Obama smoozes with the googlers

2007-11-18T05:52:00.001-08:00

It's impressive that this is the sort of thing that Google even allows - that a presidential candidate can come and present his technology viewpoints at an open forum at a company. Obviously I wish, along with the 100's of thousands of other techie wannabees, I worked for them for at least some time :-)

sharepoint to mediawiki

2007-10-03T08:02:00.001-07:00

I've had to recently convert a bunch of sharepoint pages to mediawiki. The reason is primarily that sharepoint is not really a wiki - it's a document repository system, much like alfresco and confluence, but in my opinion a poorer solution in many respects. The main limitation for me is the way sharepoint treats documents. It handles them as just HTML pages. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it does bring up some issues (which I believe wiki's do a great job of solving).

Foremost is that enterprise documentation needs to be structured in a way that keeps things consistent. The use of markup for text embellishment (font color, shape, size, location) are to be avoided in order to keep documentation clear and simple. This is definitely possible, but with the existence of a wysiwyg editor it's often tempting to slap on different font sizes to make a point.

The problem this introduces in sharepoint is that sharepoint does not have a centralized stylesheet manager. Each page might contain specific styles. For the most part this is not a problem - after all, people just want to view the text, and when they edit it it's via a wysiwyg editor. The real issue is when you're trying to index the text for search, and export it to another format.

In my case to MediaWiki (which I believe is the better documentation management system [note document vs. documentation]).

There are a few different migration tools I've come across:
* Word2MediaWiki
* Word2MediaWikiPlus
* HTML::WikiConverter (perl module)
and the most recent addition
* OpenOffice 2.3 MediaWiki exporter

When I first looked at converting a SP page to MW, I figured I could just read the HTML and do an HTML->Wiki conversion. Since MS adds a proliferation of style-related junk this is not so straight-forward. My opinion is that font-effects should be tied to styles, and so now the issue is to remove all extraneous styles, and just keep the basic document information and hierarchy.

The conversion tools unfortunately assume that the source HTML is relevant. This is a problem because the wiki page will contain all this style junk which is going to interfere with convenient editing (the whole point of a wiki).

The latest tool I've run into is OpenOffice 2.3. 2.3 introduces MediaWiki export functionality. I have been thrilled by it, since it does the sensible thing - strip out all extraneous style crap, and just give me plain wiki text. The problem is how to automatically read all the pages, keep their relationships, and convert into MediaWiki pages and links?

My thinking currently is to use Perl, UNO (the OpenOffice automation bindings), and the Win32::IEAutomation module. The latter is for reading each page and storing the source HTML as a separate file. UNO should allow me to open each HTML page, and export just the MediaWiki marked-up output.

The remaining issue is to maintain the document hierarchy and relationships. THere are 2 possible approaches:
* Read the sharepoint database and see how it stores document relations
* Walk the document link tree using IEAutomation, and create the MediaWiki documents from there

Both are possible, and neither is terribly difficult. But they'll both take time.

As I find out more about this I'll be documenting it on this blog. It's something I suspect others will want to do.

At this point I would say that I would recommend against the use of Sharepoint for enterprise document management, but obviously that's based purely on my experience. If I had to do it over again I'd probably go with Alfresco or Confluence (which are both far easier to integrate MediaWiki into, but also have "real" wiki solutions built-in).

oy vey

2007-09-27T11:27:00.001-07:00

Sometimes at a loss for just how people get the time to do the monumentally time-wasting things they do, then upload to YouTube, so they can waste more of my time. Then I can blog about it and waste others' times as well. It's so great - the Internet.

BTW, i think this dude comes close to beating Maharishi Vedic Honey, but I can't be sure - leave your comments.

Lessons on the [iraq] surge from economics 101

2007-09-26T21:27:00.001-07:00

"Economics professors have a standard game they use to demonstrate how
apparently rational decisions can create a disastrous result. They call
it a "dollar auction." The rules are simple. The professor offers a
dollar for sale to the highest bidder, with only one wrinkle: the
second-highest bidder has to pay up on their losing bid as well.
Several students almost always get sucked in. The first bids a penny,
looking to make 99 cents. The second bids 2 cents, the third 3 cents,
and so on, each feeling they have a chance at something good on the
cheap. The early stages are fun, and the bidders wonder what possessed
the professor to be willing to lose some money." [read more of this article]

It's interesting how the human condition is often incapable of giving up. You don't ever want to be the bigger sucker, so you keep gambling until the other guy looks more silly. I wonder if this is uniquely an American condition?

zoho, facebook, and more

2007-09-12T08:05:00.001-07:00

My previous post about Zoho's Facebook app, and how they should maybe keep their eyes peeled for the Facebook community replicating their work was weirdly revere-premonitious (yes, it's a word, dammit!). Just noticed that my favorite skunkworks project Parakey has been acquired by Facebook

The question in my mind is whether it's now going to be called FaceKey or ParaBook or ParakeyFace

Actually this is really rather promising, given the talent at both companies. Check out the veture beat article about the acquisition. What's really sad is that I'm so far removed from the hot new action that I find out about this stuff 3 months after it happens! Oh, the woes of a wannabe blogger!

zoho'ed up

2007-09-10T14:00:00.001-07:00

After using Zoho, Google and SugarCRM for a few months I've come to the conclusion that Zoho has a great deal of potential if a few things are implemented / improved upon, specifically in a collaborative project environment:

Better integration between documents and projects. This means I should be able to upload documents, share them with people, then tie the document into a task or project. The benefits are pretty obvious. I suspect there may be a way to do this, but I'm not completely positive just yet.
Better Task management. At present tasks can only be alloted a number of days for completion. I want a number of hours. Why? Coz I use the tasks and milestones for odd jobs, and they're usually by the hour. I also need to be able to timesheet the hours for billing.
An invoicing tool. Basically this would allow me to combine the tasks, the timesheet and a way to generate a templated invoice, then save it in my documents and export as necessary.

One VERY, VERY cool addition to Zoho is the Facebook integration, which I'm just starting to work on. Unfortunately it seems to be broken. WHen I try to add Zoho to my Facebook, I get:

Errors while loading page from application
There are still a few kinks Facebook and the makers of Zoho Online Office are trying to iron out. We appreciate your patience as we try to fix these issues. Your problem has been logged - if it persists, please come back in a few days. Thanks!

I'm hoping they get these kinks worked out so I can facebook my zoho.

Now the think Zoho needs to fear is the FaceBook community implementing all of Zoho's featureset. Chances are not great, but I've come to learn that I should never underestimate the FOSS community!!!

Social networkers need rights too

2007-09-10T11:49:00.001-07:00

Given the overwhelming availability of social networks (I wonder if any of them have made me more social or worth communicating with, but that's a discussion for another day), it's interesting to see A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web.
There are valuable long-term issues that the current wave of socializing is going to bring up. The one that I'm most interested in is the virtual permanance of the content.

The Social Web phenomenon mimics penpals of a distant era. I remember having a pen-pal in Palm Springs when I was a kid in Zambia. I had no idea where Palm Springs was, or pretty much anything about America (except for a pencil case which had a picture of an American Football pileup with 20 guys - and that confused me about football/soccer for a long time). That relationship ended about 3 letters in, when I got bored, and never resurfaced. The Social Web, on the other hand, maintains relationships in tube-space long after all physical connections have been buried, cremated and vaporized.

So the above linked bill of rights is somewhat relevant, and is going to be very interesting to implement.

BarCampFairfield wiki is up

2007-09-08T07:43:00.001-07:00

The wiki for BarCampFairfield is up.

Best music for a while

2007-09-05T20:49:00.001-07:00

I'm just blown away by Amy Winehouse. I can't believe I've never heard of her until this very minute:

I think I've just heard the best thing I've run across since Nina Simone and Billy Holiday. It's just unfortunate she's not a CC licensed artist.

More bitter gouging

2007-09-05T07:58:00.001-07:00

Maharishi Vedic Farms bitter melon at Everybody's: $4.29 / lb.
1 good looking bitter melon: 2 lb. = $8.58
The price for vedic organic produce that has no quantifiable benefit to my physiology: too much

(there should probably be a picture with this post, but didn't have my cam available)

Campy + Bar-ish = BarCamp (?)

2007-09-04T07:02:00.000-07:00

Being on the Free/Open Source bandwagon for as long as I have been I've come to realize that the reason for my love of the FLOSS is open, unrestricted collaboration. And if there are any restrictions imposed they just stop mattering, at least from the actual implementation perspective, since the code is open, and anyone can change it.
I've been watching as companies in my fair town (fairfield, Iowa) struggle with technology and implementation ideas and re-invent the wheel constantly due to a certain amount of paranoia, unwillingness to collaborate, and often just plain lack of knowledge. There are too many people who don't know that there are options beyond OSX and Windows. There are too many people who think .NET is the ultimate say in web development. There are too many people who think a Windows Domain Controller solves the world's problems.
Ok, that was probably a bit of hyperbole, and a bit of M$ bashing. But that's not really the intent. .Net is a great platform. Microsoft creates a lot of excellent solutions. But when people don't realize that there are other, better, more appropriate solutions to their needs, something is wrong.
Lest this turn into a prostletizing of how great technology is, I'll say for the record that technology is only an enabler. Just like paper, pen and chalkboard are enablers. I want to get away from the concept of technology for technology's sake. There are a multitude of problems that can be solved by collaboration and shared knowledge pools. It just so happens that technology provides the tools to make collaboration easy.
Hence BarCamp.
Fairfield is in dire need of a regular collaboration event where the permaculturists, farmers, artists, technologists and community planners need to come together to find solutions to their needs. And make the product of their labors available for the next group to work with and build on and enrich our community. Just to take a few very obvious cases:

Sustainable Fairfield project needs a wiki and collaboration platform. They're using PmWiki and a few other tools. This should form the foundation for other groups in town.
KRUU uses a CMS and CRM (drupal and sugarcrm) to run its operations, and manage all hosts. This can be used by any group for their needs.
Kelly Custer has built an amazing perma-culture garden around her house, basically creating an edible landscape which can be replicated easily around town with a template. This could result in a completely fruitful Fairfield year-round.

There are probably a hundred projects like this around town. People have amazing ideas and novel solutions. But they have not had a chance to bring their visions together, have them be peer-reviewed, and create solutions that actually fit the needs of this community.
I'm not sure what will come out of BarCampFairfield, but I'm interested to find out if a step can be taken that encourages people to work towards a larger community goal.
Stay tuned for more details - I'll start bringing up the Wiki soon.

blogs-r-us

2007-08-30T13:59:00.001-07:00

been wanting a better blogging client that's cross platform and so far the pickn's be paltry:

flock: leaks memory on amd64. blogging interface is pretty sucky. ~~not available (yet) as a portable app~~. you know, it's silly how fast people on the tubes get things done. there *is* pocketflock. need to try it out!
drivel: pretty much sucks. sorry. i really should write more on why. i'll do so soon.
scribefire: i like it so far - i can put it into my portable firefox, and have it run off my memory stick and take it anywhere i need to. wish it had flickr integration as well so i could upload pics directly to flickr (a la flock)

A little less suckage from Microsoft

2007-08-30T13:52:00.001-07:00

I had to resurrect my winbloze machine last week due to some contract gigs which required that I work with MSSQL and IE. This is after a year of the poor hardware resting in my basement, and my Ubuntu box giving me super amounts of joy. I actually had to turn the machine on because I found that MS doesn't always blow.

1. COM, or OLE Automation
I got a gig recently to automate some website logins. I initially went down the path of a Firefox extension (thanks Quinn - but when will we finish it, dammit? ;) ). That was somewhat painful, but greasemonkey is just freaking amazing. But this is about how M$ sucks less, not how Mozilla sucks less, so ...
The most convenient approach turned out to be to use COM (a complete citrix-house, so no probs). A super simple script in Perl, use Win32::IEAutomation tied to a SQL Server back end (with Win32::SqlServer) did the trick. The app essentially allows a small group of logins to be used in round-robin sequence by a large group of people, with automatic kick-out after some time. There are a number of interesting applications to this idea, which I'll have to elucidate at some point.

I really, really wish that the GUI app space on Linux/*BSD would be able to do automation like this. I know Expect can do a lot, as can Perl (and I use it almost every day). But to be able to automate an entire application (like OpenOffice, for instance) would just be very nice. The Watir-OpenQA guys are doing some interesting things in this area, which I need to follow more closely. There's also DogTail, which looks like it could be promising. I have to try it at some point.

2. SQL Server Management Studio
I blogged previously about database front-end tools for connecting to SQL Server from Linux. There are, of course, several to connect to MySQL. I hate to say this, but management studio is amazingly powerful, and nothing on linux comes close to the ease of use or power. Obviously it only works on windows, but interestingly the concept of linked servers is incredibly useful for connection to any external (i.e., non-MS) database as well.
I would love to see something like ManagementStudio on Linux. And I believe the way to do it would be using Mozilla as the framework, sort of in the same way that Komodo did for IDEs.
There are actually no hard limits that I can imagine, except perhaps connectivity to MSSQL from Linux, but thus far FreeTDS and jTDS have worked relatively well for me.
The other alternative is to do this using Mono, but my luck with Mono is pretty low so far. I'm constantly frustrated at how hard it is to make Mono do pretty much anything (as far as RAD GUI'ing I mean).

3. Regular expressions-based searching in Visual Studio and Management Studio
This is something MS should make standard in EVERY search window, through an advanced search option. I use VIM and absolutely LOVE the fact that I can regex my way through anything. I wish things like Excel, Word, Visio, and all the other MS crap that I have to use regularly would give me regex searching!
Actually, come to think of it, why the heck can't every Linux app integrate this as well? It's just a simple library to include in the compile. Yeah it would bloat things a wee bit, but it's not like OpenOffice is not bloated already!

Thus far I have not found anything else on Windows that makes me happy to switch back.

OMG

2007-08-17T20:20:00.000-07:00

You know, I've often used omg for things that really didn't deserve it. And then I had to think, hmm... I wonder if I'll ever run into a situation that makes me go OMG!!! Well we got the big whammy this week. We got a grand ole' OMFG! Yup, that good:

On an entirely separate note, but still on the omg (yeah, sorry, it's really a lower-case omg coz' you know, it's kinda exactly what we all expected but are still like wtf?) vein:

Greatest Fears

2007-08-13T20:53:00.000-07:00

My friend Peter came over for chai, and we got into an hours-long discussion about esoteric stuff. He said that his biggest fear is ...
... to open the door and find himself looking back at him.

Which brings me to an interesting point: what fears really drive us? Mine seem to revolve around stupidity ( i.e., fear of).

On a roll

2007-08-10T23:06:00.000-07:00

How the hell can I, a complete inept on the farming, grow tomatoes and arugula that taste better than anything I've ever purchased at any market? Why is it so hard to find decent produce?
But given that, Bob's barn still has the best damn peaches in this town, and that includes any organic peaches at Everybody's.
Just to give credit where it's due - whatever the hell the Maharishi Vedic Farms people are doing - playing classical Indian music to the plants, praying to them, toking up with the adolescent zucchini plants, reading poetry and dancing naked under full moons, or whatever else - something is working. The produce is the best I've had in this country. But *does* it have to cost as much as it does? I need to actually calculate if the price that is being charged by the organic growers in this town is realistic. I'm all for a fair wage, but come on: $2 for a single eggplant?! (but they taste SO good dammit!).

Stirring the pot

2007-08-10T22:35:00.000-07:00

No fool, not that kind of pot, dammit!
My friend Will recently stirred up some much needed interestingness (which I am beginning to synonymize with controversy) to Planet Fairfield (thanks John Reed for that term), by posting a review of one of the greatest restaurants that has ever existed in the known universe, and that includes the restaurant at the end of the universe: Vivo's. I'll give you a moment to allow the sarcasm to settle in.
Given the immense popularity of the aforementioned post on Will's blog (LivingInSmallSizes, which I think is a damn cool name BTW), I've come to the conclusion that people are completely out of their freaking minds. How, you ask? Ok, let me elucidate you children (that's supposed to be Chef's voice, just in case you were wondering).
Fairfield has been promoted by some of our more "colorful" (and I don't mean that in the NAACP way) denizens as having more restaurants per capita than San Francisco. At last count there is in the vicinity of 30 something food establishments in this town of 9400. I have no idea how that compares to SF, but NOWHERE in Fairfield comes even REMOTELY close to the kind of food I've had in SF. Except maybe Revelations, whose pizza is still pretty much the top of the heap around the country (if any reader of this post knows of a better place, let me know and I'll check it out: the closest I came was Il Vicino in Albuquerque).

Anyway, Will's review of Vivo's has caused Rob and me to lose our minds. We've made the bold and entirely irrational decision to test the strengths of our intestines by eating at EVERY food-service establishment in town at least once over the next however long it takes, and post our candid (and I mean CANDID) comments. I'll tell you up front that we're going to use the Steve Jobs bar - we're going to have the food either suck or not suck, and that's about it.
Why the fuck should you care? Well the coup de gras is going to be a colon cleanser that rob and I will be taking post gastronomic travails. And you'll get the full review of that as well just in case you're in need of, how shall I put it, a roto rooting?
When does this start? Well, pretty much right off. We'll first compile a list of the restaurants around town, and go down the list. I wonder if I need to include the Country Club in this - I heard the chef there was outstanding, but I've realized that people will eat stuffed goose livers and think it's heaven, so there's just no accounting for taste!

Stirring up shit

2007-08-10T21:55:00.000-07:00

If you've not figured it out yet, I reside in Fairfield, Iowa. This is home to some seriously whacked out nutjobs and some very interesting people, who can't really be categorized in any way. The combination of new-age weirdness, rural agribusiness, conservative Iowa, religious fundamentalism and a group of international students who have no idea what they signed up for makes for an amazingly wonderful mix.
Of all the places in Iowa I'd say Fairfield has the highest interestingness quotient per capita. Ok, maybe second to Iowa City, but I'd say it's going to be a really tough choice. And given the jock population in IC and the suburban sprawl that's now called Coralville, I suspect Fairfield has edged IC out quite well.
Anyway, I've come to realize that a fundamental part of interestingness is a healthy dose of controversy. Fairfield has a rich history of controversy, and I'll get to that history at some point. I just fear that if I head down that path it's going to be another night of no sleep, and pure rant, which I get to do over chai on a regular basis anyway (but just to toss this one out there: crowns and beige suits?! really?! is this not the beginning of the end of all rational behavior?!!!)

The point of controversy right now is the Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) which is being planned to go in about 8 miles outside town. A CAFO is a high-capacity livestock operation, designed to maximize yield by confining as many animals (in the current case hogs) in as efficient a way as possible. Wikipedia addresses the issue very well, so I'm not going to talk about the science or commerce aspect to it at all. The real point of the controversy in this town I think relates to the just-under-the-surface divisiveness between the meditating and conservative residents.
Now I should make clear that the line that this division is based on has greyed over the 18 years I have been resident in this town. I recall my first introduction to the divisiveness being a t-shirt in Casey's (now Logli's) donned by a 6' something, big-ass trucker dude which had the slogan "We don't need any more fucking roos" on the front and " .. don't meditate castrate." on the back. I wanted that t-shirt on sight, but felt that any attempts to engage the bear of a guy wearing said shirt would result in immediate bodily harm. Just a feeling.
Anyway, the divisiveness, from my humble standing in Planet Fairfield, has lessened over the years to the point where people are roo-townies or townie-roos.
But there is still a sentiment amongst at least some of the morons out there that there's a hard line in the sand that divides us and them.
So, getting back on the point - the dividing issue in this particular case which irks the fuck out of me is the contention by some of the farming community in this town (and around it) that their profession entitles them to a higher position in Iowa. Essentially if you're a farmer you're more of a resident than if you're not. That being a "family farm" is more important than, say, being a building contractor.
Lest anyone get the idea that I'm not an equal opportunity hater, I'll just state for the record that anyone who thinks they've got more of a stake in the outcome because they've got the goal of saving the earth through eating organic food and meditating is just as fucked. But I'll address that issue with my "History of Fairfield through the eyes of an immigrant" rant later on.
The CAFO issue has brought up the term "family farm" a few times - I've been present at the Vedic City hearing (which I'll eventually write about), and the hearing on Thursday 8/9 relating to the latest CAFO which is planning to get put in 8 miles outside town - and I have no idea what the hell this term means to the guys who use it. It's entirely disingenuous. In fact I'd equate it in techie terms to doing work as a private contractor for Microsoft or Oracle and saying that you're not really part of the system because you're independent and not employed by them. Family Farms my ass: the setup, operation, product purchase and product distribution are all directly for the benefit of the large corporate interest (i.e., the Cargills of the world).
This is not only true of CAFOs but also much of agriculture in Iowa today.
During the hearing on 8/9 at the Fairfield Courthouse, the daughter of the family who is planning on putting in the CAFO stated that 98% of farms in Iowa are family owned. This is just plain wrong. Farming is going through an incredible crisis. The *real* act of farming - growing products to feed people and to actually do so in a sustainable manner - is so limited in Iowa that it's laughable when I hear these allusions to the values of "family farming". It's a business just like any other.
All that said I have no idea, first-hand, how a hog operation really works and just how much of an issue this is. So I'm going to try to find out by visiting some of these places. Stay tuned :-)

ER diagrams

2007-07-31T15:08:00.000-07:00

When you're given a database that needs to be migrated or dealt with in any way, the most useful first step is to be able to create the 64 mile view: create a diagram of all the database entities and see how they map to each other. Then figure out how they map to the target.
This is all very nice when you're dealing with 10 tables. WHen the number exceeds 100, you'd rather have a tool to do the diagramming for you. This is what has occupied the last few days of my life.
Given my propensity for Free/Open Source solutions I wanted to see if this was possible without succumbing to the world of proprietary software. Yes, I know that Visio provides what I need, but there are annoyances about Visio which I will document in the Proprietary section below. Just read on if you care. Anyway, this is primarily a place for me to document my findings so fooie.
Basically what I needed was a way to generate an editable diagram of all my database elements (mainly tables, keys, indices, relationships) by reverse engineering an existing table, then manipulate this image and add any new relationships or maps that I wanted to. Standard ER diagramming stuff which Visio does beautifully. So, on to what the solutions are.

First, there are lists like this that have been compiled by others, so I'm going to start there:

Eagle-USB Wiki Modelization Tools
http://www.databaseanswers.com/modelling_tools.htm

There there are the Free/Open Source tools that I think have some merit. Here are my findings of all the tools out there that I ran across:

Full-blown GUI'ed applications:

Mogwai-ER
DBDesigner4: obsoleted by MySQL Workbench. Does not play well with recent versions of MySQL (>4)
MySQL Workbench: has lots of potential but is very annoying to use right now
DIA: has no reverse-engineering capabilities
DataArchitect by TheKompany
Toad Data Modeler
DBVisualizer

Scripts that produced static images (png, jpg, etc.):

dbigraph.pl
GraphViz::DBI

Scripts that produce editable images (XML or something else that some other program can handle):

sql2dia
schemaspy: creates an amazingly useful data dictionary with full references. Seems to be primarily useful on Windows for now, since the database drivers don't seem to like the jdbc drivers I have on my Ubuntu box. Maybe just a configuration issue. I'll add more as I work with it. The Drupal Schema map is a very good (and useful) example.

Open Radio: 3.5 months and still going

2007-01-17T20:39:00.000-08:00

You can't plan a revolution. At least not one that requires the input of a community, ranging from a bedtime story show to a heavy metal show. It's just not the sort of thing that you can create buy-in for, and there's no playbook to go by to get people motivated.

Which is why it's all the more impressive that a group of people like the KRUU hosts, have stuck with this project for over 3 months. There's a statistic that I read someplace which said that the 3 month point is where people start losing attention. We just crossed that point, and the only thing I have to go on is that I keep hearing from random people on the street claiming they love to listen to the station. And that's pretty freaking cool! And nobody has really burned out yet - everyone seems to be enjoying doing their shows, and the quality is definitely getting better!

Last weekend of course, was pretty heady for us, with Richard Poynder's amazing article about the station, and our objectives. Check out the Open and Shut blog for that article. But here's the best part - James Moore, our venerable station manager - appears to have coined a phrase that makes us the root of a revolution: Open Radio.

There is much that can be said about the current state of commercial radio, and very little of it is good. Add to that the dwindling value of NPR who have become just another conglomerate instead of giving greater value to their local content. But every day I tune in to this upstart little community station (and I'll grant you it's because I'm a part of it), and I smile. Not because we've managed to get this thing going, but because the content is actually worth listening to and it's stuff that I love to hear!

We're learning a lot in the process, and that's going to be the topic of the next few posts - what exactly this whole "open radio" process is, and all the crap we're doing wrong :-)

Firefox wants to be Microsoft

2006-10-30T18:15:00.000-08:00

There appears to be a trend in some of the larger open source projects where the apps are becoming "too friendly". This is the sort of thing that Apple and Microsoft have been doing for years - obfuscating the process to remove/uninstall some part of the system. I'm starting to find that Firefox is heading in that direction.

I upgraded our radio station (KRUU - http://kruufm.com) from Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy yesterday. The upgrade went beautifully, with virtually no hiccups (i'll get to that virtually part later). However, I got a call at work today saying that the previous process of clicking on an MP3 bringing up a dialog asking whether to dowload the file or play it no longer came up, and the file just played with Totem in the browser, using a plugin. This is behaviour that I had explicitly not installed by default, and yet it suddenly appeared without my request.

It took me about 30 minutes to figure out that I needed to delete the plugins from the /usr/lib/firefox/plugins folder to stop the plugin from coming in. Not so big a deal, but WHY THE HELL is there not a way to disable the plugins (or even remove them) directly within Firefox?!!! I mean, the about:plugins link should at least list that the plugins are in the folder, and can be disabled. Would have been the appropriate and sensible thing to do. Instead I have to go delete the components!!

Anyway, this is not such a big deal, except if you're a complete tech-neophyte. I actually knew how to do this. But the average Firefox user on Ubuntu has absolutely no way to know how to change the plugin, or to alter the automatic behavior. Worst of all is if the user sets the plugin to perform an action (say XMMS to open all mp3s), but wishes to later undo this function. No convenient way to back out of this. There really should be something akin to Preferences->Plugins->Remove or Content->Behavior->AssociatedApplication.

Actually, worse than the above is the fact that Firefox 2.0 seems quite unstable on Ubuntu Edgy - I get at least one crash a day, which is surprisingly bad. Maybe there's something that still needs to be configured - like the "don't crash" option that I forgot to set.

Whatafind: Zoho and Web 2.0 may give the big boys a run for their money

2006-09-22T22:08:00.000-07:00

I'm obviously very slow - it turns out that the guys at Zoho (located in my home town of Chennai, no less) are some pretty freaking awesome Web 2.0 psycho-coders. They have gone heads up against 37signals, google's online-office (i.e., writely, google-spreadsheets, etc.), and come out on top. These guys are fucking Gods!

I have to say that I've usually hated Java. These guys have demonstrated that Java, with the power of some pretty nifty Web 2.0 skills, can create some pretty phenomenal web-based applications. Are these guys the replacement for MSOffice? Hard call right now, and given that I actually researched quite a few online offerings before settling on Writely about 2 years back, they may still have to do a bit of catching up on the PR front. But never underestimate the power of the Indian hive-mind [that was supposed to be said with a Borg voice, right before "YOU will be assimilated"!].

Anyway, color me impressed, along with everyone else who reviewed their products in the last year. Now I may have to switch over from writely and all the other google-related madness. One thing that would be nice is for there to be a quick-convert system, where all the stuff I have on google-writely/spreadsheet can be imported, along with revision history.

What I was initially wondering is how they did all this. There's the obvious AJAX and XML stuff - there's a blog posting that indicates that zoho uses openoffice as the back-end to convert/manage the docs. so that means a relatively clean xml format (I suspect that writely does something similar, but they're running everything in aspx, which causes me a bit of confusion - why start with an open-source system, then head to dotNet. Maybe they're not really doing that?).

Anyway, I'm waiting for someone to dissect and analyze how these guys do their thing, and provide a good comparison between the different implementation strategies. One thing that would be good is to get one of their developers, or even the CEO Sridhar Vembu on the Open Views program that I'll be hosting on KRUU-FM. Lofty ideas? Fuck yeah. But hey, we gotta aim high, right?

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Which way forth?

2006-09-18T05:55:00.000-07:00

Don Carlos may be a crackpot, or may be on to something. The beauty of living in fairfield is that i'm actually exposed to this sort of thing, and in the 7+ years that I was in Chicago I never once came across a person that involved me in anything in remotely this weird! Anyway, Victor Sanchez's book "The Teachings of Don Carlos", has some experiments that I think I'm going to start trying out (lord help me!). A recent discussion amongst some limey friends of mine got me thinking that this might not be so bad an idea.

So, the "doing" that needs to be done? Walking backwards. Doing so on a regular basis may cause you to start "seeing things" according to one of the Jameses. Don't know what the heck that means, but that's why I've got to start on the path, eh?! And it falls right in step with the Aymara article that I blogged about a few weeks back.

The book is actually not that well received on Amazon's reviewings. In fact the negative feedback may make you stop and question whether there's more crackpot than guru to this dude. But if nothing else, walking backwards for a short time each day seems like an appropriately odd activity for this community.

On a related note, watching the looney-fest on the square during a recent Flapjaw concert brought home to me just how interesting Fairfield really is. It's hard to think that a small rThen it's a whole other world of madness, coz the net-connected universe out there can start looking in on this little community of weirdos and social innovators!ural community in the middle of no-where can be as interesting as this one. Unique does not begin to describe the whacked-ness, and that's probably why I'm actually enjoying being here right now. Some of this is pie-in-the-sky, but I'm *really* excited about what will happen when our weirdness spreads out into the collective ether once KRUU starts broadcasting.

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More Audio tips and tricks (recording skype)

2006-09-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

The SkypeRecordingHowto details the procedure for recording a skype conversation in Ubuntu.

howto-record-skype-conversations-in-linux does the same for other distros.

The procedure is pretty straight-forward and appears to work just fine. I'll be using this procedure for our radio show from here on! The only problem is that it does not work too well on amd64. I'll probably have to debug the code and see why the shared library is not loading. The error I get is:

ERROR: ld.so: object 'libskype-rec.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored.

This is apparently a bug that's been logged against the skype-rec project on sourceforge, but has had no takers so far.

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Audio on Linux (and some drupal)

2006-09-15T22:56:00.000-07:00

Ok, so we're on for becoming the most famous radio dj's of all time. No, really! So, this means that we need to get the audio part of the "radio" going on. For those of you not paying attention, radio does not yet have the video segment figured out, although we're going to do something extra special and provide visuals to our radio, a'la pretty much everyone else. I'll post more on that delicious moment when it actually happens, since this is all hope for glory and we know how that goes in this community. [Ok, I've seen the pundits already, dammit!]

What the hell does any of that have to do with anything. Well, thanks for asking Mr. Restless. Ubuntu (and Linux in general) is not that crazy about the whole audio thing. Unfortunately, in my perseverence of the Open Source model, I must see how far I can survive without a non-OS app to do what I need. In steps Audacity, which, as my friend Donald put it so finely "Has the audacity to call themselves an audio editor!" (to which I got quite defensive, and only later realized the very creative pun).

Audacity is very good for basic stuff, which is what we're doing so far. However, it has more than its share of problems with crashing on complex edits (cutting, splicing, cross-fading, etc.). It's not like it crashes every other second or anything, it's just that it's not perfect (the Beta state may account for that).

Now, there's also a bit of an issue with audio being routed to multiple interfaces simultaneously. For example, as the creators of Jack put it so finely "Have you ever wanted to take the audio output of one piece of software and send it to another?". To which I answer, "Of course, at least 3 times a day!". Anyway, Jack promises all this and more, so with much haste I performed the usual "sudo apt-get install jackd". NOTE: jack is a cd-ripping tool. jackd is the audio daemon that we're looking for here.

The real joy in Jack is the Documentation section over at jackaudio.org. As of this writing, the "using JACK from the command line" section returns a 404. Too bad (but then again, that's why we have man). Yet, the application seems EXTREMELY worthwhile. I'll have to try it out and see exactly what it does.

JACK is a daemon, and hence very command-line driver. The very excellent qjackctl gui to JACK makes for far easier configuration management and experimentation. At that link is another link to a document that describes how to use and play with JACK and a few other tools. [Direct link to the linux journal article is here]. [One point to note. The qjackctl app requires that the snd_seq module be loaded prior to running, otherwise you'll get a "Could not open ALSA sequencer as a client. MIDI patchbay will not be available". Just run "sudo modprobe snd_seq, and then everyone's happy]

A useful distro for doing "professional" audio work is the Planet CCRMA solution. As of this writing I have not tried it, but it does look promising given the reviews.

All this may give the lay reader the sense that Ubuntu is just a crappy ass platform for audio editing. It is. But that's not to say that it's sot possible to do stuff with it. Audacity allows
for the editing, and JACK appears to allow for all kinds of cool re-directs. For instance, sending a skype conversation to a recording interface. This would be very useful for interviews (and that's not easy to do right now). There are probably a whole bunch of other cool things that can be done with it, which i'm just now delving into.

On a tangent, drupal is pretty damn nice. There are a lot of really useful plugins, and it seems to be very well laid out and intuitive (unless you're a complete bonehead, like me sometimes, and don't realize that you need to save configuration changes in order to see them on your page!). Anyway, i've eval'ed TikiWiki, Joomla and a few others that are not worth mentioning, and Drupal stands out as the best CMS for the most part for non-techies running a website.

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picture show

2006-09-04T21:27:00.000-07:00

P1000560.JPG
Originally uploaded by cybertoast.

omg, i'm now a pseudo professional photographer. yuh, really. my show on 9/1/06 went over fabulously well, to the point where i now have a head that's about the size of a county-fair prize-winning pumpkin. in fact, i've been going out on the street and picking fights with random individuals and challenging them to a shoot-out (with cameras, that is).

ok, enough silliness. the show had, i'd say, about 100 people walk through. the fact that most of the people had no idea that the event venue even existed (since it's in the alley behind the athome store) was even more of a boon, since that means they actually saw the sign out on the sandwich board on the street. i'd like to think that there was no-one shooing them through the store to the rear-exit, but maybe there was some of that going on as well (really, i don't know).

i don't really know if it was the cheez-its talking (and maybe that makes it a great idea for people to have cheez-its at gallery openings), but i got so many compliments about the prints that i had to seriously wonder if my dog (no i don't have a dog) had died and people were making me feel good. but the icing on the cake was that i actually sold some of these puppies. yes, it's unthinkable, but there you have it - i've made the transition from amateur hack to world-famous gliterati. [now would be the time to start getting me booked for the next episode of up-and-coming stars in the entertainment industry!].

there are some interesting questions that came up tho', which i'll detail and leave the pondering for another time:
* do you tell people that the pics are for sale when doing a showing of this sort (i opted not to, unless they asked)
* do you do a slightly hard-sell if people are interested in the prints? (i opted not to, since i figured they should be left alone)
* do you actually sell the pictures off the wall if there's interest (i chose not to, and requested that the purchaser contact me the next day to pick up the prints, for a few reasons)
* do you take the money right there? (i chose not to since i was not handing over the print, and had no way to generate receipts)

given my expert-ness at this whole photo exhibition and sale gig, you'll see how experlly i managed the entire process up there. maybe there are some lessons to be learned for the next time this transpires (dja think?!)

rwb.jpg

2006-08-23T19:14:00.000-07:00

rwb.jpg
Originally uploaded by cybertoast.

I've started to post some of the pics from my latest myanmar and india trip. many are "series", so the combined picture is loaded up. if there's actually anyone that views this, i'd be interested to get feedback. hopefully these pics will be part of a showing at the next Fairfield Art Walk.

The first fastest man

2006-08-22T08:41:00.000-07:00

A lot has been made of Neil Armstrong. A bit less about Yuri Gagarin. I found out today about Joe Kittinger - the first guy in space. The videos below:

YouTube: Discovery Science, Kittinger, Einstein, and Gravity
YouTube: Project Excelsior

are kinda mind-blowing. It's impossible to comprehend that a guy jumped out of a weather ballon with a space-suit from 30 km up. His fall was for more than 13 MINUTES! I once dove off a pier and that lasted 4 seconds. It was about as close to eternity as I wanted to be. 13 minutes in free-fall (ok, maybe 10 minutes in free-fall and the rest under parachute) is just beyond comprehension!

Check out the videos if you haven't already seen the special on the Discovery channel (Project Excelcior) [thanks to thedailyseige for that link]

catalyst MVC for perl

2006-08-17T11:03:00.000-07:00

Catalyst seems to be the Perl equivalent of Rails. Seems like I'm doing something right since I started off with Maypole (which inspired Catlyst), then dove into Rails (which catalyst stole from for simplicity). Everything I read about it seems like I should be working with it. So, I'm taking the plunge. Installation is a bit of a bitch, but only because there are so many dependencies that need to be taken care of:

Probably the best writeup as of this writing is here
Install Text-SimpleTable. I had to do this by downloading an bulinding (installing from CPAN did not work for some crazy reason)
Install SQLite (sudo apt-get install sqlite). May as well install the Perl DBI SQLite modules at this time (perl -MCPAN -e "install Class::DBI::SQLite")
Install Catalyst and all the dependency modules
Catalyst uses Template Toolkit. Here's a good background on how to create a site using TT.
Install Catalyst::Helper - this is not litsed on the perl.com site, but it's necessary in order to run a virtual server (i.e., Catalyst's own built-in server)

Catalyst does a similar job to Rails - the site structure and framework are created simply by running catalyst.pl against the new sitename. I'll post more once I've played with it a bit. That way I can actually compare against a Rails install.

Micing it - more Ubuntu stuff

2006-08-17T10:09:00.000-07:00

My Acer box has audio ports both on the front and the back. It took me about 30 minutes mucking with the front panel to discover that the mic input does not get recognized by alsa. I have to delved into why just yet. The rear mic port works just fine (no mucking there). Alsamixergui does not show the front mic to have any input at all (i can't turn the capture on).

But at least I now have skype working just fine!

Seems like the wireless card is still a little blooie.

Then there's the DVD ripping/burning. I had to install DVDShrink, on top of Wine. It worked out remarkably easily, and here's a fine description on how to get it all going. There's sometimes a bit of inconvenience when translating avi/divx/xvid files to dvd format, but that's where mencoder comes in. It all works fabulously, especially when combined with k3b to do the actual burning.

So, my system is pretty much happy happy. The quesiotn "is linux ready for teh masses" can be responded with a resounding "maybe, but not completely". It takes work, but the benefits are huge, and things are only getting better.

Ok, now I can get on with my life :-)

Micing it

2006-08-11T07:48:00.000-07:00

But at least I now have skype working just fine!

Seems like the wireless card is still a little blooie. On an entirely separate note, life is moving forward at a respectable pace. The sheetrocking has started upstairs, and the next step is to just get all the little stuff done - and that may take some doing! Pics are at http://flickr.com/photos/cybertoast Check out the Demolition set.

Ubuntu woes and wins

2006-08-05T21:22:00.000-07:00

Ok, my ubuntu install florked on me a week back. The Xserver died with a "bus error". The fact that I'm running on an AMD64 with an ATI Radeon X600 video adapter may have had something to do with it, or the fact that i installed a whole bunch of crap.

Anyway, I'm treating it as a learning experience, and documenting some of the stuff that I forgot to earlier (obviously because it's going to happen again and I'd rather not spend this much time again). I have a Synaptic USB wireless dongle. It cost $20 bucks 3 years ago, and still functions beautifully. The fact that my computer is 40 ft from my router/cable modem makes it almost necessary, until I get down to the CAT5 wiring that I've been putting off in my house. Anyway, getting the wireless USB thingie to work was (I vaguely recall) quite easy with my first Ubuntu install. But given that I'm essentially a doddering, senile 34 year-old, I've completely forgotten how I got it working. Thank the blue 4-armed Gods that Google exists, and I can type something like "ubuntu wireless usb dongle configure" and get a list of places that might give me something vaguely related to information I'm looking for!

The exact steps to my new install and getting everything working:

Re-install Ubuntu. The install process was hampered by the fact that I already had an installation. The weird thing is that X again barfed on me. So ...
"sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" to set the video driver to VESA instead of the automatically detected ATI. There was something a bit goofy with the keyboard configuration, which caused pagedown and any of the arrows to register as a space or enter (i.e., the default button was selected by pressing them). So, reboot, re-run the reconfigurator, and back to the xserver configuration window. This time, instead of using the arrow keys to select the video driver, I hit "v", and got to VESA. Whoopie. Select the defaults for all the other q's and dropped back to shell. Run "startx", and we're in business. I'll have to download the ATI proprietary driver later (see further down).
The fact that the wireless USB dongle is not detected right off is a bit of a pain, since I need to install all the updates, get the wireless drivers, etc. But thanks to my wife's trusty Powerbook, I can share the wireless connection through ethernet with 3 clicks. Man the Apple guys did a good job on OSX. Ubuntu is a distant second to the ease of configurability of OSX. I love OSX, but that's a fetish story for another episode.
Weirdly, just plugging in the ethernet cable did not get the connection going. But a simple "ifdown eth0" followed by an "ifup eth0" went out and got a DHCP address from the Mac and I could ping google.
Security first. I figured that running the system update would be the wisest thing to do before installing any drivers of any sort, since things might get overwritten. So, on to 160 packages of Software Updates (which equates to a cup of chai, some boingboing, some nerve.com and some del.icio.us, or 35 minutes). Interestingly, the majority of the time was occupied with OpenOffice updates. Remind me to uncheck those in future when time is of the essence!!! With so much surgery it's probably best to reboot (yeah, it tells you that you should, but *I'm* telling you, so shut up and reboot, ok?! sheesh!)
Next step, get the right repositories for the easy update stuff (automatix, easy-ubuntu, etc.). Automatix is first, since it does a boatload more. So, do the stuff at http://getautomatix.com:
# sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list
add "deb http://www.getautomatix.com/apt dapper main"
get, install and verify the public keys for automatix
# sudo apt-get update
# sudo apt-get install automatix
Now we actually want the stuff that automatix is peddling, so:
# automatix
The "don't install libdvd-css" stuff I ignore. I'll probably have the FBI, CIA, RIAA and MPAA all knocking on my door, but heck, I need to be able to rip my DVDs damn-it!!!
Automatix is pretty cool and, as the name suggests, automatic. Just does it's thing with little user intervention: only asks for what it should install in a nice GUI. The best part is that it's AMD64 compatible right off, so the initial pain that I had of finding the right repositories, installing each module, finding out that 64-bit dependencies were missing, recompiling, and head-bashing is gone. They really should provide automatix as part of the standard Ubuntu install, or at least provide it as a download! There's a project called aptoncd, which is still under development, but does show a lot of promise. Hopefully it'll be released soon, since it's a pain to do all this via downloads every time!
So, what to install. I don't need the PPP stuff (no dial-up in quite a while), or MSN stuff, or Swift (browser). But everything else is a check. This is a lot of stuff to be installed, and this means some more surfing, twiddling, and general mucking about. At least it does not require much thinking. The ongoing display in automatix is nice tho' - it tells you what it's doing and gives you a ncurses progress-bar. The fonts package is HUGE (32MB), and may be something that you opt out of initially. You can install it later by re-invoking automatix. But then again, so is the Sun Java stuff (22MB), and that's basically essential.
Automatix takes some time. Ok, it takes a lot of time. I had lunch and had a long chat in the time it took for the install to complete (more than 90 minutes). This is why a downloadable automatix with all packages would be very nice.
A few potential problems to deal with:
The DVD Codecs did not load for me. The message I got was "try again later". Ok, I will.
Once Automatix has done its thing, install EasyUbuntu. This is for the stuff that Automatix left out: ATI/nVidia configuration is tops on the list for me. Installation details are on the EasyUbuntu site. The thing about the ATI driver is that even after it's installed (and it could be installed by getting the ATI drivers directly from ati.com) you need to run the aticonfig script (I spent 3 hours rebooting and changing xorg.conf like a moron when all I needed was the following one liner). So, after installation, run
# sudo aticonfig --initial --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf
And that does everything necessary. It's worth looking at the xorg.conf file to see exactly what the difference is. Essentially the original VESA driver flags are retained, but the installer adds a list of aticonfig-xxx entries for Devices, Screen, and Monitor.
A reboot is necessary for the ATI drivers to come online.
There are still commonly used apps out there that are just not 64-bit ready. Most importantly Flashplayer (for youtube, google video, yahoo video, porn, etc.), and Skype (for screwing the telephone company). To use these apps, there's a need to do a linux32 workaround - essentially running the 32-bit applications via the linux32 stack, instead of the default linux64 stack. Ubuntu provides (automatix installs) linux32, which can be run as:
# linux32 ./firefox32
Automatix appears to do most of this, but firefox32 is still something that needs to be installed manually. Here's a helpful site to deal with the 32bit apps running on AMD64
There's a list of apps that are installed by Automatix that may or may not be worth your while. There's a wonderful list at list called Essentials, 2006 Edition (which I think I've blogged about before). I wish Automatix provided a way to configure the list of applications to install. This would provide a way for different people around the world to create their "perfect Ubuntu" lists. So, get DemocracyPlayer, KTorrent, and K9Copy. Takes some time since the KDE libs have to be installed. A bit of a pain since there really should be gnome equivalent apps that run just as well, but there aren't. Just live with it!
Ok, now back to the wireless USB dongle issue. The Synaptic dongle uses the Prism chipset, so the Linux wireless drivers work just fine and dandy. The linux-wlan-ng driver is essential, and installed via
# sudo apt-get install linux-wlan-ng
This will install the drivers and create the /etc/wlan directory. The wlan.conf file provides options for the SSID for the specific interface (wlan0 in my case). The wlancfg-<ssid> file needs to be copied from the wlancfg-DEFAULT file. I'm just providing this as information - nothing really needs to be changed right now.
As with any driver install and major update, it's best to reboot the system. After reboot, the wireless interface shows up in the System->Administration->Networking applet.
The default configuration for the interface appears to be to put it in Ad-Hoc mode. The Networking applet does not appear to allow changing the interface type If the DHCP address is not retrieved, check what iwconfig returns, and make sure the interface is in Managed (and not Ad-Hoc) mode. The configuration file is /etc/wlan/* or /etc/network/interfaces.

Ok, by this time I've spent half my day. It's a pain in the ass, and totally unweildy for a newbie (even though I have a fair amount of comfort with the kernel, rebuilding modules, etc., etc.,). Ubuntu is beautiful, but I wonder if this much pain is warranted (why is it that OSX is not the model that we strive for, and instead Windoze is the bar?!).

Ok, regardless of all this ranting it's still the most rewarding thing to get the Ubuntu box running smoothly. Comparing it to my WinXP install, it's a hell of a lot more work and time. But at the end of it I have a LOT more useful stuff on my machine than WinXP with the same effort (and probably more money).

technorati tags:ubuntu, linux, tech

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Images as passwords

2006-07-06T17:52:00.000-07:00

While watching a Bank of America (bastiges) ad today, I realized that passwords could potentially be greatly improved by utilizing specific images. Instead of the standard text-only password, why not use an image? Ok, sounds goofy and inconvenient, but hear me out. All you'd need is some AJAX, an image repository (say flickr) and a visual memory. I think it could be done pretty well. The beauty of using flickr is the amazing repository of images. You could basically pick any one of them. The problem is the potential for images to be relabeled, deleted or moved off into that flickr limbo that some images go to.

Something to think about (and write up).

More Ubuntu and k9copy

2006-06-30T11:39:00.000-07:00

Ok, finally got k9copy working. This is what it took:

1. Install EasyUbuntu. This is an easier way to install dvdcss and some of the other transcode and dvdcss libraries.

2. Install KDE (I'm not sure that this is necessary, but it may help)

3. sudo apt-get install k9copy

I'm not sure which exactly was missing from the initial k9copy install, or why I could not build from source, but I don't really want to spend an inordinate amount of time on it right now since it works (duh). I suspect that EasyUbuntu was the secret ingredient.

Next step: get my printer working so that things actually print full size instead of bugshit size. Much as I love Linux when it works, it's a bit frustrating to get to that point. But the satisfaction of getting it working must be worth something, I guess.

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le tour

2006-06-30T11:35:00.000-07:00

I met Eric Mueller at Church of Chai last Sunday, over croquet discussions. He's a friend of Belinda's and lives out in Colorado. Eric is working on a very interesting project called "Tour de Happiness". He's got a monster Harley cruiser, and is riding around the country for 2 months documenting how people define, find and create "happiness". What Eric told me is that he's basically tried to live his life with happiness as the objective. This tour is an exploration of what that objective means to different people.

One of the more profoundly engaging ideas that I received (indirectly) from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, (mostly by way of other peoples' interpretations of what he said), was that the purpose of life is to enjoy. That translates to "the meaning of life is to find your happiness". Simple and yet insanely tough. There are a lot of things that make me happy. To keep my life in the path of being happy, though, is really not very straight-forward. But I'm going to try documenting what makes me happy as a stake in the ground:

1. Cooking - and I don't mean looking up a recipe and following it: I mean the art-form of the culinary deviants. Take, for example, Saffron Sauce, which I created yesterday with some help from the Internet. And some Vodka and some hella good canned tomatos (I'll get to that in a bit). I may have to post the recipe sometime since I'll probably forget it in a week. Then there's the stuff that my friend Rafael comes up with which inspires me to no end. He's a artist (canvas sort) but also a culinary adventurer who's given me ideas that I could not possibly have come up with on my own. Like baked endives. And kimchi-arepas.

2. Writing - and I don't do too much of this, which is why this bullshit here stinks so. But that's where the croquet crap comes in.

3. Traveling - which is the only reason for me to have a job really, coz without The Man paying for my life I can't really go experience Nagaland and Lesotho and a million other places that I know are just changing faster than I can get there.

4. Cool coding - like ruby and perl. It's just great fun to get some code going that works, you know?!

So, here's an experiment - I'm going to try to figure out how to generate an income using the things that make me happy (which should have been the objective all along); rather than the things that I know will make money!

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Getting jiggy with stuff

2006-06-23T21:06:00.000-07:00

I love open source stuff. Yup, just wish open-ness was the name of the game on every front. Imagine what a wonderful world it would be if societies were completely open. Ok, then again we'd have to deal with more frickin morons on a regular basis, but it's not like we're not plagued with them right now!

I got my Ubuntu box all hunky dory after a sleepless night of ./configure'ing and make-make test-make install'ing. My Ubuntu box is hella sweet, and even runs winbloze. Yup, you heard right. Actually I was pleasantly surprised today - after 2 days of beating my head against the wall getting Wine to work (for some reason it won't compile on amd64 due to some libc crapola that I've not had the patience to debug just yet) - to find that VMWare has released the Linux version FREE. As in Beer tho', not in speech. I suspect that there's some open source stuff in their latest offering, which is why they're doing this. Obviously I'm talking out of my ass, since I have not researched it - I should and will. Anyway, it's glorious to have, for the first time in my feeble existence, a Linux box as my primary, with Winbloze running inside it in a VM. It's so damn cool. Ok, the only cooler thing was to get my Powerbook (and Macbook which had to get returned but that's a painful story that has scarred me for life and my therapist is making way too much money off my trauma over that episode so it won't be repeated for some time). But it's so damn freaking cool that I have a wonderous Linux box, which acts so nice, and yet runs Windows inside it so I can do stupid things like learn my Italian and Mandarin since the language CDs with their interactive teaching tools are ONLY for windows. (Bastards)

I think I spent a grand total of 20 hours getting everything running just perfectly - my Acer Aspire E360 (hella el-cheapo box from TigerDirect.com) is now connected to my 24" Dell 2405FPW and rocks like I can't describe. Actually I had serious buyers remorse right after I got the puppy and tried to put Ubuntu on it since the ATI video card gave me hell in setup. Fortunately it turns out that ATI has Linux drivers (whoda thunk) and they work! So i've now got 24 warm and fuzzy inches of pure bliss lit up with some Ubuntu loving. The buyers remorse was really about not getting hte mini mac (I had a massive lapse of reason when I purchased the machine). But it's all well since I've still got my wife's Powerbook to play with (and she's getting understandably edgy about all the love I've been giving it). I had doubts about my being able to run the crummy little Windows apps that I occassionally need to on Ubuntu. VMWare, however, makes all that grief moot.

Just in case the above was not clear enough: Ubuntu rocks. And so does Ruby on Rails, which is my newest favourite web-dev language/framework. It's brilliant. I'm thinking of making it my love slave. More on that later.

I guess I should put something down about my latest epiphanies about travel and global situations. I think Jon Stewart is doing an excellent job of that and I don't really have anything deep to add to that at this present moment. One interesting item in recent news is the whole Bill-Gates-goes-off-to-do-the-humanitarian-thing thing. I guess I should throw in my 3.5 cents into the opinion pot. I really wonder if we'll now have global health through philanthropy working in the same vein as M$'s software strategy. I can just see the news in 5 years saying "Malaria almost cured, but cure requires humans reboot after 100 hours of activity. Reboot may cause death.". Ok I'm a cynic, just shoot me now.

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Underwear pervets with balls and sticks

2006-06-23T21:05:00.000-07:00

For anyone actually reading this blog, stop it - go do something better with your copious grey matter and time. No really!

Ok, I tried. Anyway, I should really mention the thing that keeps me going month after excrutiating month - the thing without which I may as well have become a hobo and starting eating out of the trash at the Taste of Chicago and living under an overpass: croquet! Yup, Baba's Croquet is having it's opening tourney, and anyone that is anyone will be there, in underpants. What does it all mean? Well, just check out the link and you'll know. Why the whole underpant thing? Well, who the hell doesn't want to see a bunch of people swatting colored balls in tight spandex?!

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OLPC - one laptop per child project

2006-06-18T06:29:00.000-07:00

A number of places are reporting the status of the OLPC project - particularly worldchanging.org. The pictures are on flickr.

You can pledge to support this project. The model is very cool as far as i'm concerned. You (rich person) pay $300 to own the same machine that the OLPC candidate would normally pay $100. This allows you to have a cool machine, the OLPC person to have a cool machine, and potentially provides another $100 into the research piggy bank. And $300 is a really not very much to pay for such a cool device. Think back to all the other trashy dotcom devices that came up for around this price (audrey, kerbango, etc., etc.,).

I'm ready to jump on this bandwagon immediately!

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flock to flock

2006-06-14T22:08:00.000-07:00

i have found a new messiah and he is named flock! the internet has made me an incredibly more insecure person than i ever could have been - what little confidence i gain in my skills at hacking are put to shame on a daily basis by the monumental brilliance of programmers who come out with such wonders as "flock". if you have not yet jumped on the bandwagon, do so NOW! it's the latest mozilla-based browser that does so much more. my flickr and blogger tasks are now so much easier, which may lead to more regular posts from me!

besides, i'm also inspired after my return from the latest trip to nyc, which may lead to a lot more documentation of pointless things.

A leap in time

2006-06-14T22:03:00.000-07:00

I wanted to go back and edit my posts of several months back, so that things would be more chronological, and have more detail than they currently do. Instead I've opted to move forward. I may recount some of my experiences during the travel of the past few months, but i'm not putting any kind of timeline or pressure or promise on it. There are two reasons: i'm just monumentally lazy and procrastinative (huh?), so my making any kind of promise is really meaningless; and second i think it might be more interesting to leave this documenting process organic.

Today I read about the Aymara people of Peru and their non-conventional relationship to time. Most cultures in the world consider the past to be behind them and the future ahead - this is reflected in the obvious semantics of the statement. We tend to consider ourselves in a linear trajectory with the future up ahead of us. The Aymara consider this to be opposite. In thinking about this it's obvious that they're right. The future is what we're unaware of. What's ahead of us is what we can see. We are culturally hindsight-driven, rather than foresight driven. We're always told to consider our past actions carefully when dealing with potential future acts. But in terms of pure visibility, the future is what comes at us from behind - we can anticipate to some degree, in much the same way as we might mostly traverse a path going backwards. However, what's really visible to us in order to make our decisions is what's in front of us - our past. I wonder if this change in relationship to time will make a difference in any way, or if it's purely intellectual.

On the life front - I have finally decided that moving to nyc would be a nice thing to do. I feel more inspired to do something new after being there. I obviously will need a lot more money than I have, but then again, why should that be a stumbling block at all?! I think that there needs to be at least an initial foray into revenue generation in the near term (i.e., i need to go back to being a grunt for the Man). But in the not too distant future nyc beckons.

quick summary of things that have transpired

2006-03-10T04:40:00.000-08:00

Feb 16, 2006 - this post will probably be removed once i get more detail up. it's basically an email i sent to some friends, to summarize, but should be a good placeholder.

ok, i lied about the blog. actually today is the first high speed inet access i've gotten since 2 days in early jan. sad but time seems to be much more important that i initially anticipated (too much to do each day, and slow inet is not an option).

anyway, quick rundown on my life thus far:
went to burma to work with some buddhist monks in dec. got kicked out of the buddhist monk cult for not prostrating myself to their leader (i think). they lasted only 8 hrs, then asked me to please leave - i'm chalking that up to i-still-got-mojo! decided to travel the country more or less on my own, and had a dandy time of it. the military dictatorship is not as oppressive as the media makes it out to be. they're not nice guys, but there's a reasonably healthy economic system in place for a 3rd world country. one fucked up thing tho is that they have left hand drive cars and drive on the right hand side of the road (because an astrologer told one of the generals that the country should go more to the right). surprisingly people don't have accidents on a daily basis! ended up teaching american slang at an english school for 3 days (eg. "she's so bootilicious", "i want the whole damn enchilada", "we dont need no stinking badge" - i can proudly say that i've contributed to corrupting a whole new generation of burmese english speakers). went to watch "the transporter 2" with the students. they didnt understand a word but thought that all black people are criminals in the US. had to set that straight - hollywood's impact on detrimental ethnic stereotyping is amazingly far reaching and this was very sad for me.

headed to the indian desert state of rajastan in late dec/early jan with jonii and her daughter tane and one other friend. went out on a camel expedition for 2 days and ate gritty rice and curry - good roughage i guess? got to shit out on a sand-dune which was a rather pleasant experiece aside from being butt freezing cold. btw, camels stink. and their shit stinks far worse than human, and dont u let anyone tell u otherwise! they also like to drink beer, and kept eyeing our bottles when we were drinking one evening.

was in the himalayan foothill town of rishikesh contemplating life, the universe and other odds and ends in early jan. basically turned out to be a shopping spree for tane.

headed to the indian northeast frontier provinces in late jan/early feb until now. nagaland is where all manner of moving life is still consumed voraciously. let nobody tell u that only the chinese eat dogs. indians do too! and cats, monkeys and other goodies to boot. i only got to see the canine butcher, and the hamster seller (yes really) first hand... hung out with some tribal villagers who have a remarkably striking similarity in customs, physiology, clothing and habits to native americans (maybe a long forgotten link between these peoples?), and talked about rain water collection technology and wind power. unfortunately it was all talk! maybe i'll go back sometime and start things up.

now i'm in assam (also in northeast india) working with an ngo called the ant (theant.org), working on a bunch of tech issues. quite a dedicated group that's teaching me that the real challenges are far more social than technical.

all in all i'm learning a lot, which is exactly what i wanted, and having a great time.

i'll be back stateside on mar 22nd, so i'll give u a real rundown then. i'm in a city today, which gives me access to fast (256k) inet. otherwise i'm relegated to 19.2k or 32-36k dial up, with all kinds of dns issues!

hope things are going well with u, and that it's not too cold.

enjoy s.

kolkata to delhi - en route to rajastan

2006-03-10T04:31:00.000-08:00

Jan 12, 2006

there are 2 types of people in the world - those that live to eat and those that eat to live. me and my posse fall smack dab in the middle of the former. however, it's a tough responsibility to uphold - finding those outlets that are up to par for our taste buds.

delhi, december 26 2005, started off with an hour delayed flight, but quite decent food on the air sahara flight. it was a standard veg plate - rice, curry, pickle, sort of like the BA flights' fare. due to the delay timing was pretty much perfect for catching tane's arrival. we headed to the hotel in pahar ganj, probably the best place i've ever stayed at in delhi which is not saying much given the normal 300-700rs. fare. this place had a bathtub! and it was clean!

tane, bless her soul eternally, had brought with her 3 bottles of pinot noir. and they were damn good - the $15+ variety! the 3 of us managed to polish that off right quick even though i was pushing to save the booze for new years' eve. pressure from the female wing, though, quelled my push, and instead i figured its better to consume damn fine wine with my favourite people in the world. only one missing was the bro, which we lamented copiously. further blessings on tane for bringing a couple of packs of american spirits black, which were just what i needed to get the pollution under wraps. i figured it's pointless to be breathing in all the diesel fumes if i'm not smoking something worthwhile on top of it all. and the american spirits were sufficiently worthwhile.

sharad had told me that the place to head to in delhi for breakfast was paratha wala in chandni chowk. he claimed it was the best paratha around, and in all flavors. he was right on the flavor front - everything from the standard aloo paratha to the exotic cashew and raisin, plus a variety of subji's. however, the paratha's were definitely not the best we've had. it barely passed muster in our books!

lunch was at saravana bhavan in connaught place. the idiots that conjured up their scheme for getting people on the list for a table should be strung up by their testicles. there was sufficient confusion that at least 2 people waiting in line were ready to deck the guy taking down names for a table. i would have been the 3rd, but decided it wasnt worth it. now this was at 2.30pm, so quite enough time to have avoided the lunchtime crowd. jonii, however, managed to get in with elbows swinging and got our names on the list. thank God, coz this is the best saravana bhavan in the world. and that's saying a lot. the dahi vada and the mini idlis are to die for. i'd say the intifadah idiots have it all wrong. so what if u get a hundred virgins when u get to heaven. my price for strapping myself up with a few strands of c4 would be to have the connaught place saravana bhavan's chef dedicated to me.

delhi was more polluted than i remember. it may have been due to the unusually dense fog, and the unusually cold weather. i was dragged down by the fumes, and was quite in a funk. fortunately we were headed out to udaipur to go chill and show tane some of stately india. dinner was at comesum nizamuddin station. this chain definitely needs to figure out some of their kinks. the idea of a fast food, clean, and relatively efficient place right in the railway station is quite brilliant. it's been necessary for at least a few decades. their fare is remarkable good, and the prices are reasonable, though a bit on the higher end. the procedure of ordering though is atrocious. you've got to order and pay up front at a counter where the guy has no idea what is available and what's out of stock. so there's always a bit of phase distortion between what you want and what you can have. but there are a laot of options. the nizamuddin comesum has a guy making fresh badam milk. and it's freaking awesome. he's obviously a bit of an artist since he doesnt just hop to when u place your order. he takes his time, putting final touches on your clay pot of badam milk, almost toying with u coz you're constantly thinking "man, not enough nuts" or "not enough malai", but he saves that for last coz u want that floating at the very top to savor!

comesom nizamuddin station was my very first encounter with the brand, and i have to say that thus far it's a pretty damn good thing that they exist in the railway system. and the badam milk was a great way to leave delhi with a good taste with your mouth.

northeast frontier territories next up

2006-03-10T04:26:00.000-08:00

Jan 19, 2006
one thing that's a contstant while traveling in india is change. adaptability to the irritants and issues of the moment is a must. this is particularly true of travel in some of the less accessible areas of the country. earlier, my experience with burma, and the rather dramatic change in plans due to bootage from the gayuna cult brought made me aware of the need to be adaptable. now in nabadwip things are heading in the same direction it seems.

i should step back for a second and provide a bit of background. the reason for my travel to the northeast of india and to burma previously had a couple of different aspects to it. my story though changes on a regular basis so my story today may not be the one that you heard before or the one that you are likely to hear in a few days from now or when i next see you. i quit my job for want of a real challange and due to frustration with the management of the company's inability to recognize certain talents that people had. namely moi. the fact that i saw nothing more challenging or satisfying than the current position i held over the next 5 years (made doubly obvious by the fact that i was doing the same job i had 5 years previously). so i had to leave. the reason i gave for leaving was that i had an opportunity to go work with some non-profit agencies and ngos. this is only partially untrue. my intention was to go on the service tour with the cealo organization and get my hands dirty worknig with some burmese villagers, assisting with whatever they needed. that went wrong quick. i also put out feelers to aid-india, which is hooked up with several ngos around india. on a more ethereal front, the reason for specifically picking the burma zone was due to jonii's prognostications. her assessment of my astro-cartography was that a very prominently helpful line crossed through vancouver, seattle, phoenix, guadalahara, san juan, capetown, assam and northern korea. obviously the sine wave crosses a few other places, but not many. the vast majority of the line is in the ocean. maybe the other option is for me to be on a boat?! of the lot, the assam area, which includes the burmese sector, sounded most appealing for a number of reasons. it's remote, sounds slightly romantic, and not too many people think of it as an ideal place for the next phase of their life. in the vein of going against the grain, as i've tried to do all my life and ultimately get forced back towards the grain, i opted for the burma direction.

given events that have transpired to date, burma does not appear to be particularly welcoming towards me (re. ghosts, chucking from cults, and generally strange associations). but i'm the stubborn sort and need to have the nails really pounded into my skull to actually get a clue. so i'm thinking the ephemeral astro-cartographic track is probably has a right side and wrong side. i need to, obviously, be on the right side of the tracks, which would be the western side which puts me smack dab in assam, sikkim, arunachal pradesh, etc. so that's the plan now.

on january 18th i was introduced to the contact person that would give me access to the mystical north-east of india. this 70-ish gentleman, generally referred to as storyman, used to work in the indian border services in nagaland. storyman is retired and used to rent a room in the house behind sajal's. shortly after he moved in (storyman, that is) his window was pelted with stones by some passers by and the landlord pointed fingers at sajal. the landlord allegedly tried to convince storyman to lodge an official (i.e., police) case against sajal. storyman refused to believe that sajal was involved in the stoning, and somehow decided to approach sajal with the story. and that was the beginning of a friendship of sorts. the fact that sajal is a tantric and a jyotishi of sorts may have also contributed to storyman's wanting to make contact, since sajal's account randomly inserts the fact that storyman wanted to have his chart read. sajal says that when he read the chart he saw that this person should have 2 marriages. so he asked storyman if he was married. storyman said that he was. so sajal said that if he was married he must have 2 wives, or at least a concubine or a mistress. storyman said that that was not the case. sajal persisted that if the date was correct and the chart was correct, then there must be a second family someplace. the story finally came out that storyman had been married to a naga woman while living in nagaland. upon arriving in west bengal he married a local girl 30 years younger. he had basically abandoned his naga family, but was maintaining them remotely (he has 4 children in nagaland). his naga family is pretty well taken care of and the kids are working. sajal's theory is that storyman married the naga girl to protect himself from any potential insurgent activity.

storyman is a very gentle looking person. he's got a bit of a hunch, but it's apparent that he's a very disciplined or honorable person - he carries himself with great stature. he has incredibly tired eyes, which are immediately apparent. i initially thought it was due to alcohol, but i now think it's just age. storyman's english is quite good, but precise and slightly labored, as though he wants to pick the words carefully.

i was introduced to storyman since i had expressed interest in going to nagaland and the north-east. storyman said that he would contact his friend in kohima, who was an auto parts dealer, and send me word the next day. my plan was to leave on the 20th of january, since my indrail pass expires on the 25th.

jonii and i were wandering about on the 19th shortly after lunch, back to sajals, and ran into storyman. storyman asked whether i had gotten my train reservations. i said i was planning on doing that later in the afternoon. storyman quietly, and completely in passing, mentioned that he had spoken to his friend in kohima and had been informed that it would be better not to go before the 26th, which is india's republic day, and instead go after the 27th because "there may be some blasts". the conversation carried the same sense of caution you might get from someone informing you that it might get a bit cloudy over the next few days. i decided that it's probably best to heed the advice and stick around for the prescribed duration - until the 27th - so that we were not in the path of any blasts.

why storyman might know anything about blasts needs to be explained. storyman said that his motorparts friend (let's call him motorman) in kohima used to run a guest house a few years back, prior to the nagaland peace accords. he had a couple of lodgers that stayed with him for about a year. over the course of the year motorman started realizing that these lodgers were actually insurgent leaders. whether or not motorman is still in contact with these insurgents is unclear. motorman also used to work for all india radio as a driver many years ago. there's an enormous amount of conjecture surrounding sajal and his buddies. the godfather vibe that sajal exudes may or may not be real. but on the strangeness front we may as well surmise that somewhere there's an insurgent connection, which is giving us information that we should keep away for a few days.

so, plans change. the next step is to either head just to assam, bhutan and return, then head on to nagaland later on, OR head out on a jeep expedition with sajal to a few temples and places where he can prove the existence of ghosts to me and show me some tantric things.

Yangon ho!

2006-03-08T02:46:00.000-08:00

Dec 5, 2005
I don't read omens. Jonii's recent jyotish classes and omen-related education caused me to start paying some attention to events surrounding me. Those that understand these things would have probably had much to say about the minor events that led to my entry into Myanmar.

1. I got quite sick from the pollution in Calcutta - got a horrid cough that i could not kick.
2. When I arrived in kolkata, i went directly to the IA office in the airport to change my return flight from yangon from the 22nd of dec to the 26th of dec. The gentleman at the counter was quite helpful and said to me that there would be "plenty of seats, no problem", which gave me to surmise that I could just as well make the change when i check in to my flight to yangon, or when i get to yangon, on dec 4th. Obviously I am an idiot and did not take into account that everyone in any kind of service position lies incessantly in this country. When i got to the IA counter the following day in Calcutta they said the 26th flight was completely full, apparently of monks from burma heading to gaya. Some very resolute monks to have made the booking at night. Silly of me not to have made the change when i supposedly had the change tho'.
3. When i checked in to Yangon my flight in Cal, i overheard a woman behind me stating to a friend in hindi "oos admi ka inthna kam baggage hai ... unse pooth loon" [that guy has so little baggage ... i'll ask him]. given that i was the only guy in line with only a backpack, i thought to myself "oh fuck! she's going to ask me to help her wiht her overweight baggage". pretty much exactly what happened. I don't recall if I told you i was an idiot, but just in case the point did not settle in well enough, I actually went along with her request, and somehow got nailed with one of her carry ons as well. and not just anything - the thing i despise the most in the world: roller suitcases that fit in the overhead compartments!!! cruel world, why do you hate me so?!! best of all, this woman, meenakshi, does the whole coyness thing that indian women do that causes me to cringe. the show of being helpless makes me want to shake them until their marbles settle in the right sockets and they the dollar signs in their eyes and their tongue hangs out and they shit a bag of gold coins.

anyway, 3 hours, a crappy indian airlines sandwich (2 slices bread with the edges lopped off, a layer of butter and a layer of cheese-wannabe milk product), and a very nice immigration lady at the burma immigration counter later, we wait for baggage. my bag shows up about 2 minutes after i get to the carousel. meenakshi's bags show up after all the other passengers have left. meenakshi's baggage has enough stuff to declare that she spends another 40 minutes at customs. i waited for 20 for her to fill out her forms, but then realized that this was pointless. i waltzed past customs' green channel pretending not to know anything, with 2 of her gigantic suitcases. i was just hoping that i would not get accosted and sent off to mandalay bay prison, where the food is not supposed to be too good. the problem now was still that i needed to get a ride into town, and my guesthouse (the heaven inn) had aparently not sent a car. plus i had meenakshi's baggage. so a painful 20 minutes later she gets past customs, and is greeted by her husband, who's been watching me coz i obviously have luggage that looks like his wife's.

we all get introduced, and meenakshi tells her husband that i really helped her a lot, to which he hands me his card and says 'let me know if you need any help in yangon', and they start taking off. my mind usually takes a long time to react since i need to go through the politeness factors, then put in the will-they-be-inconvenienced variables, and then punch up the card that i need to play. this usually takes about 30 minutes longer than anyone is willing to wait, which leaves me with zingers without a victim. sort of a george costanza and shrimp plate syndrome. but this time, maybe because of my incessant cough, extreme hunger and slight fever, marbles move in the right direction and I say "actually you can help me right now - i need a ride to my hotel and a suggestion for a restaurant with vegetarian food". this caused them to pause for a moment. i don't think they were expecting to have to do anything further with me, but they couldn't very well refuse at this point. i got the ride, prefixed with a lunch of chappati and dal and baingan fry at their house.

boldly he heads forth

2006-03-08T02:11:00.000-08:00

dec 5th 2005
jonii and i got a couple of nights together in madras (yum), after which we headed in opposite directions (not so yum) - she to the south and i to the north and on to burma. not the best of circumstances, but i think given my current state of mind (cranky and assholic) it was probably best that we were separated for a while. the point of this trip was to get to do some thinking and being on my own. the mere thought of touristing caused me grief.

india provides about the most diverse forms of transportation that you can find anywhere in the world, all available to the adventurous traveller - everything from bullock cart to bus to airplane. traveling between the indian metros boils down to either the relatively slow and somewhat stinky express trains to the relatively unreliably and lacking in customer service airlines. the latter have supposedly changed with influx of new and sexy independent airlines. we now have choices beyond the ubiquitous indian airlines (who've rebranded themselves as just "indian", dropping the 'airlines' suffix ostensibly because that was an insult to the industry). pricing is pegged to sexiness of the air hostesses i think. being generally oblivious of all these subtleties my departure from chennai (nee madras) to kolkata (nee calcutta) was by the venerable indian airlines - cheap and matronly. IA is an institution that boldly reflects the state of the indian government and all services public. my 7pm flight managed to depart at 9.30pm with no notice of the delay. fortunately the airports have improved over the years and the throngs of sightseers (who i'm sure came to see strangers fly off since they were just so happy that someone was leaving and giving them a bit more space) have been kept away with a hefty Rs. 60 entrance fee.

indian air travel does not require id's. this is more welcome than i can emote. the bullshit that the west puts in with all their id related crap irks me every time i get on a plane. why even a third world country (ok 2nd world country) can get it together to ensure that there's safe travel without the need for a pointless id card while the US can't really brings up a lot of ancilliary questions - john gilmore had better win his case and i'm praying every day for it!

however, let it not be said that the indian airline system does not have irritants. when i got to security check the officer (armed with a rifle) indicated that i did not have a cabin baggage tag on my luggage. i said that's not a problem since it has my name tag on it, and it's got an american airlines platinum tag on it. he insisted that i must have a cabin baggage tag from the appropriate airline. i told him that i was going to keep my bag with me and that it did not matter. he insisted that i go get a cabin bag tag. at this point i realized that it's not a good idea to be getting hostile with a guy with a firearm especially over a piece of paper. i figured he was an idiot for making the suggestion. about 20 minutes later, when i was boarding my flight, another passenger was made to go all the way back to security check in order to get a baggage tag. it's good to see that mindless beaucracy still has a strong position in india.

arrival into calcutta sent my eyes swimming. the pollution in cal is ferocious. and i was introduced to getting raped by the taxi-wallas. i needed to get used to it, so better that this came early. instead of the customary Rs. 250 fare from the airport to alipore, i had to fork up Rs. 500. granted it was past midnight, but hey, there should be at least a token of civility, no?! a 60kph ride for 45 minutes scared me shitless and by the time i got out of the cab i had somehow forked up another Rs. 50 for a tip. somewhere in there is a lesson that i have not yet learned!

phew i guess

2006-03-08T02:02:00.000-08:00

internet access is available all over india. even in the smallest of villages. rates vary from intolerable, where you sit for 30 minutes and get your login screen show up for gmail, to frustrating, where you sit for 30 minutes and just get your email out when power goes out or the connection dies. this is to say that my ambitious hopes of being able to blog from the road on a regular basis encountered india. hopes get dashed easily here, which is why you're got to really appreciate the fortitude of the masses. anyway, here's the blow-by-blow, in retrospect. just imagine you're reading it over several weeks!

beaten senseless

2005-11-30T17:08:00.000-08:00

i'm getting used to the horrendous imam who wakes me up at 5 am. it's scary that he's at it before the earliest birds. i'm figuring the birds have given up on being the dawn-breakers since this dude beats them to the punch and has amplification on his side.

there is life here that i had forgotten about. the grit and grime and rawness of existence here is something the residents have become innured to. it's making me feel alive, in that way the meat-packing district makes you feel at 6am, just before the carcasses are washed away but after the stench of blood and guts has pervaded the atmosphere so you feel like an entity has to be quelled with every step you take. that's india - the entity that needs to be quelled at every step. the land of ten thousand irritants, each one more aggressive than the last. but even here things are being squashed by mall culture and road-a-holics. there are more roads and flyovers than i remember, and it seems like there are only going to be more.

i could easy get used to this place and forget about my previous existence. it's beginning to happen already, and it's only been 6 days. SIX days! Feels like i've been here for an eternity already, but i've only been unemployed and out of the uS for 6 days!!

there are obviously things that i would have to get used to. having a servant who's constantly being polite to me is kinda strange and i'm still not on the correct frequency to know how to behave with her. the streets have no "footpath" (curb), and that's going to take some time to navigate. walking in the middle of the street is something that should come naturally though! actually there are several streets that have footpaths, but they're almost never used. they're designed in a very odd way - they're about a foot off the ground, so you have to step up and down constantly; they're also quite irregular and have obstacles that must be contended with: peddlers, trees, fences, adverts, etc. basically they're pretty non-functional which is why they're avoided.

family and tradition and culture are the big things to get back in sync with. i've been trying hard to keep my toes in line and put the best foot forward, but i think i've already fucked up at least a couple of times. yesterday we went to a traditional "vazha-elai" place (i.e., banana-leaf service) called Sanjeevaram. they serve you on a banana leaf, which is a treat that cannot be described unless. when we were kids we would salivate at the thought of having banana-leaf meals, and it turns out that my little cousins still do. banana-leaf meals bridge generations! at the end of our meal i grabbed something off my aunt's leaf that she just left. that's definitely not kosher down here. i had forgotten about the concept of "yecchai", which refers to eating in a "polluted" way - kinda like double-dipping. i guess i knew it subliminally, but my stomach overcame my cultural sensitivity!

family relationships are huge in the tam-bram community it seems. i cannot stress enough just how deep these instincts run. but i'm a bit unsure right now about whether this is systemic or just related to my immediate family - are all tam-bram families so formal with each other?

chennai is adapting to "international" standards, whatever the fuck that means. the immediate translation is mega malls, high-rises, big-ass hotels, and glass hi-tech buildings. are these the inevitabilities of economic progress? as long as we're doing business with the US we're going to try to emulate them in every way possible. my relatives seem to think that the small guys will be able to survive regardless. i'm not so sure. i think that there will be rules instituted in the next 5-7 years where street peddling is licensed and limited to specific zones. a giuliani-zation of chennai if you will. nyc's pushcarts went the way of horse-drawn carriages, even though the masses on the ground thought that they could never be quelled. the fruit ladies, the flower girls, the paper-wallah, the knife sharpener, they're they heart and soul of an indian existence, and i fear that they'll be swallowed up whole like gold jewellery was by fashion trinkets. here's my prediction: by 2010 there will be a movement by the local governments to start clearing out the pushcarts and "upgrading" the system. bicycles and human-powered vehicles will go teh way of the bullock carts and cows. (incidentally, what *did* happen to all those cows and goats that were loitering around the city constantly? how did a thousand cows and goats get moved away so completely?) mall culture will take over and people will buy the vast majority of their produce from stores, instead of pushcarts. you can see it happen already - it's easier to find parking in front of stores, so my father decides that's where he'll go to buy whatever he needs. the pushcart vendors can't compete with "free shampoo with your purchase over Rs. 300. their marginalization has, i think, started in a very subtle way. the argument that the underclass and pooor will still have to buy from the pushcarts is going to start fading away. even the poorest person will be buying from something that resembles a small wal-mart. no, not resembles, it'll BE walmart. i can see it now - all the cheap labor here fuels the likes of walmart who can buy massive quantities of produce at ridiculously low prices. and they'll throw in a free packet of shampoo to boot! have we heard this story somewhere before?

what are my chances of being wrong? i think reasonably slim. the transformation is already beginning. the lower income brackets aspire to be middle class. and the middle class increasingly consumes from brick-and-mortar rather than wood and wheel. there's one more thing that's already beginning to help make the transition. there are fewer and fewer footpaths for the vendors to set up on. so where are they going to peddle from? there's a guy on royapettah high-road who sells peanuts from a tiny median on a 5-way intersection. that'll go away in another few years. there's a chance that i'm way off, and the reason is pondy bazaar, a street packed with 3 layers of vendors: the permanent brick-and-mortar shops, the quasi-permanent street vendors on the footpaths, and the nomadic pushcarts and walking hawkers. and they're all competing with the same product marketed to different segments. there's a glass-front BATA store with air conditioning and salesguys that call you ma'am and sir, and right outside is the footpath vendor who's selling nike, reebok and bata knockoffs, and just beyond him is the hawker with bags of flip-flops. you'd need a really big sieve to filter all of this competition down to a single mall-type storefront. but that's the sort of thing that walmart is really good at. let's talk again in 2010 and see where things are at.

there are three sure-fire money-makers in chennai right now: restaurants, wellness businesses (hospitals, clinics, pharmacists, alternative healers), and religious outlets (gurus, temples, churches, evangelists). restaurants are understandable - we've got to eat, and madrasi culture loves to eat! wellness, on the other hand, is just plain odd. across the street from my parents' place is a renal laboratory. next door is a clinic. down the street is an ayurvedic clinic. next to that is another clinic advertising "asthma, arthritis and digestive disorder" cures. in a 1km stretch anywhere in the city there are at least 4 clinics or health centers. i used to think the US was hypochondriac. chennai (i don't know about the rest of india just yet) puts the US to shame. there's more quackery here than a pond-full of ducks in a kellogg wellness institution. you name it they've got it, but only if there's no accountability for it: reiki, pranic healing, energy healing, vastu. the crap just keeps building. the best part is that i have at least one family member directly connected to each of these areas of bogusness. it's fascinating that the population here has completely given up on taking care of themselves and have put their lives into the hands of snake-oil salesmen. maybe it has always been the case here and i've just never noticed? i'll leave out the debate of whether the US's staunch squashing of all things alternative to maintain some untenable form of accountability is better than this stew of dubious solutions! the religious/spiritual connection is taking root everywhere in the world, but not in a healthy way at all. there is a minority propounding grand unity and true inter-faith peace, but for the most part the rest of the gang is quite divisive. that's the only way the leaders of these movements gain respect and a following i suspect - controversy sells! and indians love an argument.

in the next few days i'll have a view into the slightly seedier parts of town and let's see if they mimic the middle-class strangeness of tam-bram society.

1000 words

2005-11-28T01:27:00.000-08:00

jesus is pretty popular lately in chennai.

i never could figure out how the cross-o-philes figured the brown and black masses in the third world would fall for a blond-haired, light-skinned guy. i would have thought their marketing department would want to localize the brand and make images more like the natives. but i guess that's why they're running the world and i'm writing puny lame-ass blogs!

the good thing about india in general is that all the gods get their share of attention. the jesus-nuts are presently the ones on the big bandwagon, but that's just the fad of the season.

used to be the hindu's not that long ago. there's a massive parallel between the fear of marginalization by the hard-cord right in the USA and the hard-core right in india. they both represent the majority religious view, but feel that they're going to be swallowed up whole by the minority groups. i'd say the fear is at least slightly justified in india, since the jesus-freaks have so much more backing than anyone else. i love the religious phrases tho' - they're just so je ne sais quois!

one of my aunt's cooks' son is vijay - a kid with no fear.

he claims he's not afraid of any firecrackers, and goes around with a plastic pistol in a pink holster. i went over to my aunt's house, and ended up sitting outside having a conversation with this kid in my broken tamil and his hard colloquial dialect. i'm not sure how much we communicated, but i couldn't resist taking some pictures of him.

missionary position

2005-11-23T19:57:00.000-08:00

once in a rare while i end up with an excellent seat on a flight. my london-madras leg put me in a window seat on the wing, behind the emergency row. it's a row of 3, with the row in front having only 2 seats. the seat by the window is eliminated thanks to the protruding emergency door. so lots of leg room for me. couldn't have been happier. my neighbors were a young skinny black couple, who looked very introverted and seemed to keep to themselves. the girl wore a black headscarf. the guy was absorbed in the book he was reading and taking lots of notes. two black guys, an older balding gent and an early twenties tall lanky kid, were our neighbors to the front. there was one other black couple that i saw getting on the flight while in line, but i didnt see where they sat. a black american group that has all the women wearing headscarves heading to madras was a total novelty to me. i first assumed the younger members of the party were students heading to some college, maybe manipal. but obviously with 10 hours to spare on the flight i had time to get all the details. or so i thought.

i'm not normally the sort to strike up conversation with random flight mates. but this was one that i just could not pass up. about 2 hours into the flight i decided to get a sense for what the group was about. the girl, whose name i never caught, was not very forthcoming.

"are you on vacation to madras?", i asked. a lame opening, but i was really at a loss for anything better.

"yes". she giggled, which was odd to me, like one of those smiley new agey types.

"your first time?" i persisted.

"yes". she was smiling pleasantly, almost coyly. when i get monosyllabic responses i sometimes feel like maybe they don't want to continue with that line of questioning. but then again i'm stubborn and dense sometimes.

"are you traveling around, or on a package tour or something?". now i'm reaching for gaps to pry open.

"i think we're just going to be around madras" she said. sometimes the prying works. "but i'm not completely sure. i'm going as part of the group.". aha, so the black entourage *is* together.

"should be fun. where are you guys from?" i ask.

"north carolina".

"are you on a student trip?" i'm still getting the vibe that something's a bit strange with the group, but want to get at the details obliquely.

"we're traveling as part of my church. um, we're going to do some missionary work." there's definitely a sense that she did not want to put out this message too clearly. probably for good reason!

i now realize that the husband, who's on the aisle seat, is reading a rather large bible with lots of annotations and footnotes, and he's taking down notes on a per chapter basis. he's got a spiral binder with pages that have the book name at the top of the page, and each ruled line numbered with a chapter title. he was on romans chapter 22.

"oh nice" is all i say. i want to ask what kind of missionary work, but the shyness of the girl, and the fact that the husband is studiously writing away, and the guys in front who both have heard my conversation so far and seem to be pointedly ignoring it all makes me stop for a while. i actually try to get some kind of response from the older gent when he's up a couple of times, but that goes nowhere as well.

i'm a very judgemental person when it comes to religious zealots. missionaries fall squarely within that category no matter how good the work they're doing. and believe me, i'm not on the whole anti-conversion bandwagon - i just don't like to have some whacko religious order that believes that some dude who got nailed to a cross for a few hours is the reason for my salvation. on the other hand, this girl is really nice, so i decide to hold back my sentiments and be nice. i'll put aside my irkedness to be civil since what else can i do at 30k feet?

i had written these people off as yahoos, but i start getting really bored with my books another 2-3 hours in. so i bring the topic back up to the girl.

"you said you were part of a church group? what kind of missionary work are you doing?" those who know me realize that i'm now looking for an opening for an argument. a way to dismiss what this girl believes. it's pointless and mean but that's me.

"i'm not really sure. i think we're going to visit some orphanages, and we're going to a conference", she really sounds unsure of what she's doing now, rather than attempting to be oblique. she reaches over to a bag by her husband's feet and pulls out a folder. inside are some printed sheets with instructions, directions and a schedule - sort of like a convention program. they're going to the ascension church in madras. i decide i need to look it up when i get net access. there's nothing of real depth in the info that's in the folder. just overviews that proved addresses and contact details.

i'm now completely deflated, plus my traditional tam-bram hospitality sentiments start welling up. how could i have been ready to diss this poor girl when she's a guest in my hometown? i actually start having pangs of guilt!

"well i hope you have a good time with them. if you can you should try to go around a see a few things in the area. would be a shame to have come all this way and not really get a sense for the history of the place." this is my attempt at tourist hospitality. i think i need to be retrained!

"thanks", she giggles again.
oy vey! i really should be minimally thankful that someone is thinking about the wellbeing of the masses all over the world. given the degree to which the under-classes in india have been fucked, there should not be an iota of distaste in my mouth for those that want to provide a helping hand. but it kills me that all the missionary work is done with such callousness. i can just see pat robertson and his godamm 700 club saving the indian heathen for the rapture. that's the shit that gets under my skin and makes me crazy. the fucking bastards put out their version of moral rightness which is like a subliminal inquisition. it's a virus that will destroy what little culture there is here.

but then again the indian heathen coexist with far more ruthless parasites on a daily basis. pat robertson and his savior cronies are merely on the level of tapeworm, rather than flesh-eating bacteria!

engorged wetness

2005-11-23T07:17:00.000-08:00

you know when you're home when the sounds that wake you up either piss the hell out of you or make you fondly remember days when you didn't have to get up at ungodly hours fo school because some damn fool polititican died. or the sounds of a foreign civilization that is foreign no more - things that you could have sworn you would never again remember and they well back up like warts. and when all these emotions boil into a simmering stew of a cacophony at 4.30 in the a.m. you feel yourself all the way down, like snorting a good heapful of wasabi and washing it down with a line of camphor. my 4.30am was an imam who should be put out of his misery and ours, an auto rickshaw on a completely empty street honking away just to let the world know that he exists, and the warbling brain-fever birds who have taken it upon themselves to replace the ubiquitous rooster for the wake-up call. only thing missing was a badly tuned transistor radio, but generally those dudes are not at it quite so early.

madras, my home, is being cleansed of its miriad sins. scrubbed and rinsed until its chafed sinews and guts are starting to show - and they're not pretty. the drains are overwhelmed and the rivers are engorged and overflowing. not so long ago this was a frigid, dried-up crone of a land. and now she's so wet and flush she may actually be regaining a bit of her viginal self. how much cleansing is necessary is unclear.
there's so much prayer and corruption here that once the pollution is flushed away the gods may yet have to heed the calls of the devoted. this is where a good collaborative dayplanner would have helped - too much confusion between the needs of the masses and the power play of the gods!

the brown nation is pretty damn resilient tho'. the tsunami wrecked a few things that have all been put back together. a rainfall of horrendous proportions made a watery hell that inconvenienced the dabba-wallas and wada paw guys for 3 days before they got back on their beat. the gods, still a bit peeved threw down their sledgehammers and the earth itself shook, and that gave us pause for a bit. so in all a heavy rain is just a little tinkle. and what fool-blooded human can say no to warm humid wetness anyway?

two days of unemployment and this is what's become of me! i want to start making decisions on which way to turn but i think i should heed a good friend's advice and just be - sit out the decision making for this run and see what kind of lifeline the universe throws my way.

T minus 3 days @ 4.30am

2005-11-17T05:07:00.000-08:00

it's 4.30am on thursday as i write this, and my brain has decided that being anxious is orthogonal to sleep. why the fuck can't i just be anxious AND get a good sleep, eh?! this is quite a serious design flaw that i'm going to have to take up with the manufacturer at some stage..

the next couple of days are going to involve ensuring that i don't drop all the bowling pins that i have in the air. actually, they're more like swords on fire that i'm having to juggle, but that's just nitpicky! for no reason other than that this is what seems into my fickle mind at 4.30 in the AM, here's the list of things i need to get done in the next 3 days. ohmygodohmygodohmygod it's only 3 days! you're lucky you can't hear me shrieking like a schoolgirl - it's not a pretty sight i assure you.

1. el banko must be dealt with. i want to address a rumor around my workplace that i've got some massive gobs of cash stashed away, which is why i'm able to go off on this silly jaunt. i would much rather leave the myth hanging that i'm some financial genius and i've also figured out how to make utsi pay me huge gobs of cash for what i do. but i'd rather just deflate that balloon in case people start showing up on my burmese doorstep asking for handouts.

there's almost no doubt in my mind that my bank balance would make my co-workers completely shocked that a) i've been unable to save more than i have and b) i'm tossing caution to the wind with such a small chunk of change. come to think of it i suspect that most people in the tech world would just write me off as looney. my excuse? the weirdness comes from the dr. pepper (that goes out to my homeboys jatin and satish who, bless their souls, will NEVER tire of that joke!)..

on the bank account note, i have to give due credit to the international banking system, without which i would be absolutely unable to go do this crazy thing. the fact that i can deposit money in an account in the u.s. and have the cash available through a machine in krishnaghar in west bengal is way fucking cool. and believe me when i say i hate "the man", but it's definitely getting harder to be upset at the guy ;-) btw, citibank rocks. i know they're bastard scum that launder all the world's money and are crooks and cheats and all that other good stuff, but their service is outstanding and i'm glad i got an account with them. hsbc in the usa is a pile of stinky poo. these guys are completely inept and i can't for the life of me imagine that anyone would want to bank with them! ah well, i guess live and learn, eh?

2. the final move to fairfield. my car, my unnecessary clothes, my toys, my junk. this is going to be interesting today - i've got to load up the car, meet james for breakfast, get my bike from rushad's, head to work, get my last paycheck, go to the bank to deposit, have lunch with mike, sync up with rushad to get his car and drop him off at ohare, figure out how to get his car back into the city and get back out to get my car, and head to fairfield. somewhere in there there's a little guy in a red suit with horns and a tail just laughing it up. i really should be freaked out of my mind, but i believe my brain has actually stopped comprehending what's going on, and i'm kinda in a state of bliss right now - it all seems just so much fun! yup, i think the marbles are finally loose :-)

3. the final pack-job. things are looking very good on that front. my backpack has exactly the right amount of stuff at least at first glance. i may have to get a few more underwears (boxer briefs if anyone's asking). otherwise i think i've got everything covered. i'm actually surprised at how easy things are going, since a 5 month jaunt should really require more. but i've been living out of a box for the last 2.5 months, and i'm realizing that i have *way* too much stuff - as has been amply detailed in a previous post.

the plan is to take the kelty backpack (redwing 3300), and a small shoulder bag, as checkin. I'll also have another small bag with my camera, a change of shirt, and a few other electronics (mp3, phone, etc.), and my sleeping bag. the change of shirt is for the benefit of the indian customs guys. i've got to have a shirt that says "don't fuck with me", but in a nice way. seems i always get into india looking like a bum, and that may be the reason for getting hassled so much. worth a try anyway.

There has been some very strange sudden change in the past day or so. winter has arrived in full swing - without any pussyfooting. the temperature dropped from 55F to 20F in about 30 hours. i'm very glad to be heading to the tropics! also,
i thought i had lost my work badge on monday. given that i need to turn in my badge when i leave, it's a bit strange that i would lose it after 7 years just days before my final departure. but thanks to the 4.30am insomnia attack i've found said badge under a pile of receipts that i was apparently hoarding for the express purpose of hiding badges. i had resigned myself to dealing with the consequences (what could they *possibly* have been tho', considering i'm leaving!!!), so there was not a lot of joy in finding it again.

things i'm looking forward to for the next couple of days:
1. being in fairfield for one last time for the next several months
2. completely shuttering my house, and getting comfortable with leaving - i'm finally going to have a day to have the entire situation settle in. thus far there have been other distractions such as work to keep me occupied.

not the long laundry list i had anticipated, but there it is!

Saturday, October 29th, 2005 12:45IST

2005-11-03T08:09:00.000-08:00

Saturday, October 29^th, 2005 12:45IST

A new priest began the sacrifice that is dedicated to Sani propitiation. Kathy is the target of this endeavor. This priest is young & has a very nice voice as he is reciting the mantras. Now Kathy will have to wear a capsule (like Kenny) that is prepared with gemstones inside. Sajal is concerned & rightly so about this sacrifice. The last one presided over by the old priest landed the poor old guy in hospital. He got run into by someone on a bicycle. We were in Darjeeling when we heard the news, so again we assumed it meant the snake ceremony was a success for Kenny. Now this new priest is a whole lot spiffier. He looks pretty neat & clean & well to do in dress, etc. We are all taking this as a sign that he is very successful. I’ll call Kathy later this evening to let her know she’s on the cosmic calendar.

Suzy is hoarding these Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups she brought, saying they’re gift items; which she says about everything, yet she’s not given out any of the huge supply she ferried over. She keeps buying things here to give out.

As I started to say; Sajal has concern that this one is going to be tough. Like the snake ceremony, it’s going to require some serious effort, and we all will be putting our attention on the success. Today & tomorrow are for this sacrifice, then on Monday we head into the Rahu propitiation for Angela. Sajal is very positive about this ceremony’s success. Angela will also be receiving a capsule to wear. All of these recipients must agree to wear said capsules, as they take much effort on the part of Sajal to make. Kenny’s in particular, as was reported to him, has a piece of fabric that two cobras were dancing with in the full moon light…

Sajal's World: Chapter 2

2005-11-03T08:07:00.000-08:00

CHAPTER TWO

This mornings wake up was particularly obnoxious. There was the usual clanging pot action, supplemented with some mosquito-like miked female singers in a can. Then from the easterly direction came another groups input. Now this was live over a mike & was a somewhat better male singer, but when mixed with the already going action, it was simply insult to injury.

Up & at ‘em.

The Misty sisters are already with the honey, lemon water for Suzy & I, & are patiently awaiting our emergence from the room. They’ve left out the ginger, because Suzy read in some Ayurvedic magazine that plain honey & lemon in hot water first thing in the a.m. will reduce weight. Oh, fine. They announce our “garam jal” (hot bath water) is also ready & that they are going to Sajal with tea.

During my bath, the gathering of the usual suspects as well as a few additions gets under way. This mornings crisis is centering around “the fat, black priest” that Sajal had recommended to the temple that he sits on the board of directors for.

It seems the fellow had been observed pinching rice from the temple stores. The night before last, Sajal had been awakened with this news at approximately 1:30am (just after he had fallen asleep). He therefore, had to get up & go ride his shiny new bicycle over to see for himself. According to his word he had parked his bike in a visible position outside the temple & hidden himself in shadow. Sure enough, the fat black priest & his wife came now to the spot & out loud were wondering whose fine, new bicycle this was, when Sajal emerged from the shadow. Sajal made mention of the lateness of the hour & inquired what they were doing there at this time of the night; in the meantime grabbing hold of the culprit’s bag & taking a look at what might be there. Not to his surprise, Sajal found rice of the same quality (Indians know their rice, if nothing else) that Sajal had purchased for the temple. The priest’s explanation went along the lines of having purchased this in the market, but wouldn’t furnish details on which shop, knowing that Sajal would’ve immediately wakened the owners to confirm.

Back to this morning; the fat, black priest has been summoned to the room downstairs to be confronted by the actual benefactor responsible for the funds that are purchasing the temple stores. There’s a whole lot of yelling & sawing the air as I breeze by after the bath in my night dress. I get the details from Suzy who was down there just before the fireworks began when the fat, black priest showed up. By the time I make it to the actual inquisition room the whole thing has dispersed as though nothing has happened. No one seems put out in any way. All the participants are having chai & bidi’s & smiling & talking of other interests. The Sani propitiation, inclusive of fire sacrifice, is about to begin in the patio area. This will be performed over the next 2 days & will bleed into a Rahu propitiation by late Sunday evening (tomorrow), continuing Monday & Tuesday, then culminating on Wednesday when 3 different ceremonies (these current two & the snake ceremony from 2 weeks ago) are brought to a close.

Sajal's World: Chapter 1

2005-11-03T08:05:00.000-08:00

CHAPTER ONE

What the feck is all that din? It is sometime in the middle of the night or the wee hours just before dawn & some group or another is banging for all their worth (which isn’t much, but they seem to enjoy exaggeration) on that which can only be cookware, accompanied by a croaking, miked voice screeching out Hare Krsna, Hare Rama. This is not a special festival night. It is the usual, “Let’s wake up all the non-believers with our incredibly grating version of God’s names”.

It’s impossible to know what time it is, as we have no clock. We do have a cell phone that I could root around for, but it really doesn’t matter, it’s just too damn early, no matter how you slice it. Not to mention, there’s no guarantee I could locate the specs to see the little numerals on the cell, if I did manage to find it. Now that I’m awake, there’s a choice: do I go downstairs to pee, risking life & limb on the pile of bricks mimicking stairs, quite probably encountering bugs the size of a buick; or do I go pee down the drain on the side of our room& wash it down with the bucket of water brought up for this express purpose? The aesthetic repulsion at this juncture is really only in my mind, as no on in this neck of the village would bat an eye over it. Grossness is part & parcel of life here.

I opt for the life threatening descent & as I round the corner, flipping on the bathroom light as I pass through “the kitchen”, I spy a machete emerging from the downstairs room door. I can’t see who it’s attached to, but I swiftly look to the right where it is pointing to see a pile of monkeys sifting through last night’s Laxmi Puja Prasad. I emit a yell & run back upstairs to grab a bamboo pole & run back down, all the while yelling. I twirl it like a martial artist into the midst of the pack & they scatter. Leaving the remains of the Puja scattered, likewise. I pick up what is not demolished or bastardized by them & put it in a bowl to be washed & distributed to any early morning guests that are sure to be arriving soon.

Good morning Nabadwip!

After the melee, I realize the machete was being brandished by one of the “Misty” (sweet) sisters. The Hanumans had menaced them by chasing them with teeth bared. They usually go for girls, no matter the size or age. Who knows why they reacted to my rushing them, maybe I was not fully awake enough to be scared, just pissed by their bravado. Interestingly, even the smallest of male children can chase off a pack of monkeys, but the girls they’ll attck every time.

The sisters, Mejo & Chota (big & little)are greatly relieved & without missing a beat, get on to drawing water ot heat from the well, accommodating Suzy’s & my bath; and making both garam lebu, ada, madhu (hot lemon, ginger honey) water & a separate pot of cha to awaken Sajal with, who is sleeping in his room across the way, visible from the upper level of our compound.

By the time I’ve finished the teeth cleaning routine (an entity unto itself) the girls have already returned from Sajal’s, mission accomplished, & are onto rinsing out any clothes we’ve left in any pile either upstairs or down.

The bath is by bucket, as may have been surmised by now; and although when we were last here, 2 & a half years ago, we had seized one side of this concrete structure as a bathroom & the other side dedicated to the squat toilet. We’ve since been confined to both the bath & toilet in the same side. Not our first choice on good ideas, but in the long interim of our absence, the “bathroom” side had been encroached upon by Sajal’s rather impressive levels of pack-ratting. We’ve yet to re-claim the acreage & may just forego it altogether in favor of just adding another story on top & making a real usable western style bath/toilet with all the amenities, such ad soap dish, towel bar or hooks (or both).

It takes a certain level of determination to get thru a bath balancing the soap & shampoo on a ledge of the door frame (the only area that might possibly be slightly cleaner than the rest of the nasty arrangement) & thanking the lord above for your fanatic forethought last time here, insisting on a tiny, nearly useless little bar of hooks that’s hanging on the door for dear life in the face of the Indian onslaught.

Emerging from the bath, I find Sajal’s world in full swing. Sajal has arrived in the compound & all are in attendance. One of the Misty sisters is serving him up more chai, while the other is massaging his legs & feet as he reclines on one of the two queen bed sized structures in the downstairs room where he holds court. These structures are mattress free, but piled high with all sorts of unlikely items; bags & bags of things, mysterious; that become known when Sajal is searching for something specific. Two to three minins will begin thrashing through them in earnest at Sajal’s command, spilling the contents of all for perusal.

There is a really thin “electrician” friend here now, smoking a bidi & sipping a cup with Arthur & Suzy to get the day started off on the right foot. I hed upstairs to get dressed & Mejo (big sister) follows me up to make sure I recognize the bowl of “no chini” (sugar) curd they’ve brought & is now sitting on the floor, under my bed, in a plate of water to keep off the piplis (ants). A curious thing about yogurt in West Bengal: it is always sweet. It is one of my least favorite occurances, & I’ve enlisted the sisters to make me special non-sweet batches on a daily basis. Not only are they on that mission, but they are masters of the West Bengal sweet called Rasgulla. I’ve never had better & they began bringing them to me to the tune of 6/day. Luckily, I ran off to Darjeeling for a couple of days, but as soon as I returned, so did the rasgulla. I had to sway them from the path of my supreme obesity by making them promise to only bring them once a week.

When I head downstairs again, there are at least 3 to 4 new characters on the scene. Uma, a short, stocky little loudmouthed dishwasher/general wipedown artist is yelling in her course, hoarse voice at Sajal. There seems to be a crisis surrounding her not getting her breakfast portion of chai & biscuits (the British word for cookies) because the dhutt (milk) has run out & the packet of biscuits is missing. Someone has obviously absconded with it…most likely suspect: Alo Mashi.

Sajal has known Uma & her sister, Minuti since childhood. They are of the Sudra caste, but have a certain level of pride whereas they are up to battling back with a few flinches when Sajal tries pushing them too far. Sajal has a running commentary in English that Uma cannot understand, but she guesses rightly that it’s derogatory, running along the lines of Uma wanting to “bed” Sajal all the time. She explodes in a top volume tirade & hits Sajal hard. He grunts & acts like he’ll beat her, but the tiny little form holds her ground. This is pretty much a daily routine.

Now, Alo Mashi is not going to show up before 10am. She is of a higher caste (Vaisya) & is therefore the cook. Uma does not like Alo Mashi & vice versa; and the Misty’s, who beat it out of here by 7:30, latest, don’t like anyone in Nabadwip, (a very bad village, altogether in their estimation), except their father, brother & Dada (Sajal). They will show up again around 4pm bearing really good samosas that they prepare for their father & brother to sell in the market every day.

Alo Mashi is an enigma. Sajal vacillates between gossiping about her thieving, covetous nature & extolling her virtues, almost bragging about her cleverness & abilities. In all cases, however, she is referred to as “that bloody bastard”. She is approaching 40 years old, but has never been married as she is incapable of bearing children. Get the picture? She is the eldest girl of six sisters & three brothers. Sajal constantly creates the picture of Alo Mashi desiring to entrap him in marriage; and robbing him regularly. He recently had an inspiration while in the throes of some sacrificial ceremony or another by the burning ghat that the only way to assuage her desire was to give her something she could transfer her love to. Shortly thereafter opportunity presented itself in the guise of a puppy. It was a fluffy whit spitz being offered for sale at a deeply discounted price by a neighbor of Mashi’s. She mentioned it to Sajal, who responded that he could not commit to caring for a dog; but then, by divine intervention he realized the import of the moment. He told her he would buy it for her. She said she could not afford to keep a dog, so Sajal promised to maintain all costs. Enter Rajada.

Suzy is an animal lover. She will always rise to the defense of any creature that is not human; those she feels can fend for themselves. As we wend our way throughout India she will distribute many dozens of Marie Biscuit packs to any of the various species of 4-footed citizens of the sub-continent. She is known as “The Snack Queen”. Here in Nabadwip, in fact anywhere in India, people don’t really have a great love for the poor animals. The fact that Sajal has taken on this aspect of Suzy, animal lover, is therefore, a rather interesting development. He did display some leanings in this direction during our last sojourn here, but nothing could have prepared us for what greeted us this time. Rajada is the new love of Sajal’s life. This dog he calls Dada (brother), and the little fellow is allowed, nay, encouraged, to lick the inside of Sajal’s mouth! Sajal regales us with involved stories that at some point I suddenly realize are about the dog.

Aside from that bit of nonsense, the other surprise awaiting us was Sajal having rescued a tiny kitten from a garbage heap where he was about to become a pack dog’s dinner & brought him home for Suzy to care for.

Snack Queen snapped into action & succeeded in over-feeding the poor tiny soul to the degree of necessary veterinary intervention. She didn’t stop at giving the starving kitten cooked fish every day (who would simply gorge), but living up-to her reputation, supplemented it with milk & sweetened yogurt, just to be sure; never-minding the fact that his little wormy belly would swell immediately to practically double his size.

So, the night before last the crisis of little “King Tut” came to full fruition. Exactly who was responsible in this den of animal torturers for pushing tiny Tut’s nose into the dirt so hard he could neither smell nor breath, remains a mystery. There were a few vague references to a tall 23-24 yr. old, no one recognized as from the area (a clear pack of lies, told to keep Suzy & I from throttling any of the locals) and no one could give account of his whereabouts. Then there was Suzy & Sajal’s theory that one of the little kids, Sajal calls “Devil boy”, from tenant’s row (part of the inherited lands that Sajal & his brothers rent out (another bit of intrigue for later discussion) was responsible for the act of terror.

This very night that King Tut was laid-up, unable to eat or breath through his nose, was accentuated by another visitation. An old friend, Visnu had been called by Sajal earlier in the day to announce that Suzy, Arthur & I were in station. The last time Suzy & I saw Visnu was at Howrah station just before we left the country two & a half years ago. Sajal had given him a call then, as well, & as we waited for our train to Delhi, within half an hour, Visnu had arrived. Prior to that we had seen him in 2001 at the Mahakhumbamela in Katya Baba’s camp, where we all spent a few hellish days & nights to the sadhu chant, “Chai, Chillum, Chappati” & kept from anything that might remotely resemble sleep by the loudspeaker installed just above the tent we were “housed” in. I must keep using quotes in this text, as the description is just so far away from the reality.

Round about 5pm there was a commotion at the back door through the “kitchen”, which by rights should be the front door, but is locked & blocked by a big pile of rocks & a lone plant that bears a lovely white trumpet type flower. Sajal was yelling through the door to someone & I heard Visnu sprinkled in there, so I looked out over our little “terrace” to see what was up. Sure enough, it was Visnu, accompanied by two others I didn’t recognize. This little gang turned out to be the “Calcutta Contingent”; three “free men” (by their own account), that hopped into Visnu’s car in Calcutta immediately upon hearing of our presence & partially drove, then got on a train for the remainder of the trip, arriving here a few hours after Sajal’s call. The other two with Visnu were a doctor of anesthesiology, who remains nameless to us, & Bacchu, a fellow who has given up working for a small pension & spending his time stoned on chillum & chanting at various temples in the Calcutta area. Although I hadn’t met these two before, they were well known to Arthur & Suzy, who’d run up against them with Visnu some years earlier in Calcutta. There was all around hugging of the men (they don’t hug women, unless “Rainbows”), and they were full of tears of joy & much hashish. Sajal, the perfect host, although in the midst of the Sani Sacrafice, (finished for the evening), quickly arranged with his temple to accommodating the three. He also gave them the option of staying in the room downstairs. Over the course of the evening, the three began to add hard liquor to their on-going program of smokables.

Sajal bowed out sometime in the revelry, having abstained from any pollutants (as he would in any case) heeding religious observance & needing rest for the sacrifices that would continue with the new day. Suzy & I had long been asleep when I fitfully rose & headed downstairs to the loo. The three “freemen” & Art were making such a racket that I stopped to question their male-bonding ritual’s position in respect to our windows above. For reasons known to them, they had posited themselves in the courtyard rather than the room below us that could buffer the sound of their drunken chatter that had increased by plenty decibels. I ended up down there twice, as they reawakened me with explosive levels & I figured, “no time like the present to utilize the loo again.” At some point I heard the noise subside & then locking the front door & lights out. I relaxed into slumber.

An hour later the clangers began their reign of terror while the Misty sisters quietly arranged our morning bathing & imbibing rituals.

Everything is predictable in hindsight

2005-11-01T05:09:00.000-08:00

Everything is predictable in hindsight. The trick being to get the clue as it is presented. We left Nabadwip in an ecstasy of rain, headed for Darjeeling, Sikkim & points N.E. after a not so bad 3 tier AC ride asleep to New Jaipalguri station we spent a good hour deciding to just continue on the toy train all the way to Darjeeling for free, as opposed to 2 & a half hours in a share jeep for Rs.600, reasoning that even though it was an 8 hour journey, it should be enjoyable from our 1st class position. Well, there were no available seats in 1st class & until that moment of embarkation, we'd not actually realized there was less than 1st class. Turns out, there is. Coupled with the description "toy train", one might begin to adjust the understanding of what our next 8 hours were like. Even for the relatively small Indians, it was an inconvenience to say the least. Imagine, if you will, Art, Suzy, Sajal & myself in the cattle car of the Darjeeling Toy Train packed to capacity. The continuing omen presenting itself for all to see was studiously ignored. As we arrived in Darjeeling for some reason we began walking uphill to our chosen guest house out of the Lonely Planet's first budget entry, rather than engaging a porter/taxi. It seemed we were determined to live up to "difficulty is our motto". After utilizing the new cell phone with vigor by calling the guest house owner at least 5 times for continuing directions, we arrived in a cloud (literally) that didn't bother to lift for the 3 days we were there, except for the occasionalpunctuation by drizzly rain.

We did re-find the Tibetan momo house we'd longed for over the past 6 years, although it turned out the "Hasty Tasty" was putting out a better momo product this time 'round. However, the Tibetan joint was unparalled for freshly squeezed orange juice & wide noodle soup, Suzy loved. We found Glenary's had a lovely "heavy cake" for those fearless of eggs & a "chocolate" doughnut that had the taste & consistency of sopapilla's from El Patio in Albuquerque; although
their rendition of chocolate leaves one a-wondering what the hell they could possibly mean by that; if you ignored the color & name, it was quite enjoyable.

After two days of nary a glimpse of the mountains we'd come to see, we headed downhill on foot to the District Magistrate for the permit to Sikkim. They didn't open until 11am & given that we were there at 10:30am we settled in for tea across the way in a building that, had there been no cloud cover, would've sported the most awesome view of Himalayan views imaginable. But alas… Promptly at 11am I ran over with our applications & voila, we were on our way up the mountain (on foot) to the foreign Tourist office for further stampage of the document. Have I spoken of ordeals yet? If so, here then was another of the rascals. Not the actual stamping once arrived, but the getting there. The nice man at the Magistrates Office's description of "a 15 minute walk" was brought better into focus by Suzy's added comment, "for a goat!". Not to mention the constant stream of jeeps hungary for passengers going anywhere, spewing their nasty, non-CNG omissions into the environment/your face. Finally, as we had our stapage & had now only to return to the Magistrate's office for yet further stampage, I prompted Art to approach & hook onto a nice English girl who was heading back down, as well, but by taxi. I thought, "Here, at least, is someone with sense & we can ride down with her." Sure enough. It worked! I had broken the back of "difficulty is our motto" & gotten us to take a ride down. And don't you know miracles come in two's?; she held the taxi & it brought us back up the mountain, depositing us directly down the street from our new favorite, "Hasty Tasty". Gotta love those Brits for knowing their way around an ex-colony. When the driver started to complain that he wanted more than the Rs.100, she just laughed & said, "that's more than fair." & turned away. We now had our way cleared for Sikkim &amp;amp;amp; only l;had to fix ourselves up with a share jeep for Rs.150/head. I determined that we should purchase 6 out of 10 available seats in a jeep (not including the driver & his cut partner). It goes like this: the driver, buddy & two riders in the front seat, 4 in the middle seat, & 4 in the back seat, for a grand total of 12/jeep for 5 & a half hours. Again, let me remind you dear readers, of the bulk of ourselves as opposed to that of most Indians. It is simply a matter of physical not-going-to-happen. Somehow from my idea of Rs.150-200/head, equaling Rs.1200, Art & Sajal ended up commandeering the whole jeep for Rs.1700. Oh well, at least we kept our bags inside & out of the continuing rain on the trip over. Now, on the said "trip over", we were waylayed in a town called Legship by the local gendarmes looking for baksheesh to the tune of Rs.100. we held our ground while the driver desperately attempted to locate his proper permits to put off the inevitable payment. We still don't know if he succeeded, but we were delayed by at least 45 minutes.

At long last, Sikkim!; looking in no way any different from Darjeeling in the sense of nary a mountain in sight, only dense cloud hugging us. It really does boggle the mind to realize fully & finally at the end of it all that we were given clear indication right from the start at the 4am Nabadwip departure &amp;amp;amp; that we could now look back & say, "Oh, that's what that meant." Okay, no more "Mr. Nice Guy". If the clouds don't disperse by the end of the day, (which everyone keeps saying will be the case), we need to move on. I am beginning to feel ever so slightly depressed with this weather; no views, no treks, just sitting around reding a book in the most dramatic landscape ever to not bebeheld!

We decided to hike up to the Pemayangtse Gompa at any rate & it didn't rain, but didn't clear either. As we took to the road (it being about a 2 kilometer hike) a black dog began to accompany us. There was a fork in the road & the dog led us on the one that went to the Gompa, rather than the one most traveled on. It was really rather remarkable.

That evening we fixed a ride with a share jeep that didn't have a buddy with the driver, so Art & Sajal shared the front seat with him & Suzy & I got the far back with two seats facing each other, with no other encroachers. The arranger took one look at us & realized there was no way he was going to jam us in with the 4/seat gang. So the cruise down was not half bad. The best part was that the cloud had dispersed before we left at 5:30am over Khangchendzonga & we were graced with the sight of that dominant visage seen from all points in Sikkim. It was worth the entire miserable trip, after all, just to be able to experience this splendor. Art & I got pics & hopefully they will give a glimpse of the magnificence.

We headed out at 7am for Siliguri & upon arrival Sajal got us the smallest, stinkiest auto available, instead of the more roomy style & we headed over to New Jaipalguri station to see about jumping on a train. In the end, that's what we did. Nothing was available on 2-tier AC until the following day at 5pm, so we booked it; but after a bite to eat at a pretty good restaurant a really long way away from the station, we went back & waited for the Teestatoasta Express TC & we got some berths on that train leaving immediately. Onward back to Nabadwip a full 5 days early due to inclement weather.

I always love the return to Nabadwip, as we invariably arrive late in the evening or early morning when the streets (cobblestone) are deserted & there is only the swish of the bicycle rickshaws peddling to disturb the 3am peace of the slumbering villagers. It feels ancient & magical…until Sajal stops our 4 rickshaw parade, jumps out of his & ambles up to a doorway. He booms out a stream of Bengali through the locked gates & waits, puncturing the silence now & again with further instructions to the unseen dwellers within. Finally thedoor opens & Sajal is handed 3 packages of dhut (milk). We're back.

Kali Puja [by Art]

2005-10-31T07:02:00.000-08:00

Your right it is very busy here. I am right now in the trows of a Kali Puja fire ceremony, You would like the fashion pice Im wearing. It takes a few days in order to activate the fire pitt so that on tuesday we can do justice to Kali and what ever she does besides cut head off ( Ego ) with her curved sword on a stick, aslso with the garland of heads around her neck and standing on Shiva who is pretending to be concord. well anyway there are a few capsuls that are being made for a few friends of ours who need yagyas to ade them in whatever problems they may have. I get to be involved with throwing a few highbiscus, bay leaves and a mixture of rice ghee and a black gram or something of that nature. while throwing them in I repeat some mantra over and over again for sometimes 108 times sometime 26 its all very hot of course.

Our cook we have is very good. She cooks a varity of dishes like rice and dahl, tomato chutney, kitury ( kind of like gumbo ) sqaush they call pumpkin, chappati, oreiental noddles, paneer different ways, and we have sweet yogurt very sweat for some reason, and many variations of those things sweater, spicier.

Suzy has taken up with a cat here in Nabadwip. It was beat up pretty bad and she nursed it back to health. Now it is bouncing around crying for fish. She calls it King tutt after yes the King from Egipt........

The Vaidya

2005-10-29T01:30:00.000-07:00

The vaidya’s son assured me that when I finished the term of medication the effect would be permanent & not just fade away to how it was prior to taking them. I am delighted. I cannot remember when I felt so free & easy. I have had some pain in my neck & upper back for at least 15 years. It has left me. After so many years, chiropractors, massages, etc. it was a lack of some necessary mineral. My God, I’m so fortunate to have stumbled onto this.

Of course, I ran back to him to get something to send to my mama with Jennifer, who can post it from the States. I only hope Flowie gets some relief to the extent I have. It’s really like a miracle for me. I hadn’t realized how much that pain was a part of my existence until it was gone. I’m so happy.

The run on the Rajdhani was an excellent overnighter & “poof”, we were in Calcutta. That’s when things really got sucky. The pollution levels overwhelmed my already weakened state & after a mere 5 hours in the reeking area near Sudder Street I succumbed. Luckily, we determined to head to Nabadwip that evening following unsuccessful attempts for lodging in Cal. When we arrived I was already down for the count & spent the next 2 days in near delirium while the denizens of Nabadwip, with Sajal at the helm, prepared for the fire sacrafice that it turns out we were playing an integral part therein. Just in time I recovered to sit 3 days running next to a raging dhuni fire, nearly either passing out or scorching my poor self by. This was presided over by a 90 year old, plus priest who pretty much sat by that fire reciting mantras non-stop for the entire 3 days. Occasionally, we had to join or Sajal was controlling other parts of the sacrafice, but that old priest kept chugging away. Right at the end of the final blessing a wind whipped up & rain drops began to fall. Vayu & Indra & the Gods had arrived to bless the sacrafice. As the last words of blesssing & Ganges water hit our bowed heads, the old priest looked beamingly upon us, stated that he was very happy & “give me rupees” escaped his lips. We wer relatively taken aback for a second or two, then quietly asked Sajal how much we should give him. Sajal boomed, “No, this guy knows we have a contract, don’t give him!”. “But, he asked us.”, we murmured. Sajal came back with, “Just give him one rupee.” So we ended up giving him a couple rupees each. It is, after all, the quintessential India: the divinely sublime mingling with the uncontrollably silly.

Next came the snake ceremony. This tended to be a lot heavier undertaking & the old priest demanded extra help with the ritual as it could have a backlash & he wanted to spread out the consequences a bit. So, for about 2-3 hours on Saturday morning there was all around discussion & preparation made for the picnic style set up of the ritual down by the ghat near the cremation grounds. By coincidence, & unbeknownst at the time, the spot chosen under a banyan tree by Arthur the day before, had seated under it right there a murti of the Snake Goddess. Sajal only noticed it as we began to set up the sacrafice. It had only been seen from behind the day before & now it bvecame very pertinent & fortuitous.

The actual ceremony only lasted 2 to 3 hours. After having had to endure the fire sacrafice for the past 3 days it seemed surprisingly short. Interestingly, however, there was asmall herd of cows & another of goats that kept menacing the sacraficial preparations & had to be constantly kept at bay. Sajal said he’d never seen so many of these animals here & theywere trying to disrupt the sacrafice. Once the actual ritual began they stopped coming. At the conclusion the old priest said to me that it was good. I asked Sajal if he felt it was successful. He replied that he had been so engrossed in his one-pointed concentration on “Kenny Hardin” that he hadn’t noticed if the fire had surged up or extinguished when the bananas & ghee were offered. Arthur said he had noticed that the flames had gone higher, so Sajal said this was a good indication. Later on that evening we got further confirmation of success, by way of a policeman showing up at Sajal’s door & requesting that Sajal accompany him to the police station, ashe wasunder investigation as a gun-runner. An excellent Rahuvian style backlash onto the main priest for taking on the karma successfully of another, we all agreed. There is but one small sacraficial detail that Sajal is fasting for today. He finishes it up alone as he feels we are incapable of yet another day of fasting.

Tonight we leavefor Darjeeling & although Sajal was initially told not to leave town for a month while the investigation was in progress, they eventually lowered it to 2 weeks, then 1 week, then a few days. So he determined to go with us today, as it has been 2 days now.

Arrival in India - jonii

2005-10-27T07:52:00.000-07:00

The arrival into india was surprisingly hassle free. In stark contrast to the departure from O'Hare. As Sundar & I approached the airport I had taken notice of the array of cars across 4 lanes in front of us. They were all the color of dark gray or slate, if you will. At which time I immediately looked in the rear-view mirror & noticed all of those behind were yellow in color. It was striking, as there were at least 4 of each color in front & behind. The thought entered my head, "Rahu" at the sight of those dark gray vehicles & "Guru" when I saw the rear. In fact, I did realize at the time that this was an omen. An omen that I interpreted as; I was about to encounter some Rahuvian style resistance that would end up okay in the end because I was being backed up by Guru. This turned out to be exactly the case. I was delayed at the check-in counter for about an hour because the person there was under the impression that I had to pay an extra hundred dollars, (which I had just paid prior to my trip to the airport). Finally, she admitted (not really) her mistake, pretending it was a glitch in the system. Actually, she had not listened to the words I had spoken. Then putting my check-in luggage thru, the inspectors demanded they unlock & look into it all – for nothing. He just opened my incredibly well-packed piece to pull a few things out (just enough to make it near impossible to repack) & not allow my assistance; just trying to re-jam it all in & finally couldn't figure out how to put the cover back on. The result was that I had to shout instructions from the sidelines & when I finally
cleared the security with my carryon, I walked straight to the gate & onboard with not a moment to spare.

So the flight itself was issueless & upon arrival into Delhi International I joined the really long "Foreign Passport holders" line. After maybe 5 minutes my eyes slowly focused on a sign off to the right that said "Diplomats & PIO". It took a moment or so for my brain to register that that meant me & I immediately extricated myself form my line making a beeline to my personal line of love & affection. Being the only "Diplomat/PIO" in the bunch I sailed on thru without further adieu. I'd arranged for the Master Paying Guest House to send a car to pick me up & it all went swimmingly. The monsoon was still putting up its last efforts & Delhi was washed clean. Coupled with the autos being forced to convert to CNG, the air was clean & breathable beyond my wildest expectations. I encountered no problems with my allergic reaction to pollution, what-so-ever.

Heading into Rishikesh this time we ended up on the bus from Haridwar for Rs.15 each, as the usual auto drivers were being particularly obnoxious with the rates they were quoting. So Jennifer & I landed up at the Hotel Yoga Niketan for Rs.600 that night. High season was still in effect. By the next day we decided to check out our soon to be abode at the Dayananda Ashram, & when we did, they told us to come right away. We thought it was a whole lot better thaqn Rs.600/night & headed over with cargo, even though the Jyotisa course would not begin for another few days.

As it turned out, the swami in residence, "Brahmavidyananda", was set to give a lecture every morning throughout our course on Vedanta. Luckily, there was someone taping all the lectures & the series will be available to me soon for all to hear. It pretty much sums up in 9 hours what it took Maharishi 30 years to spit out.

Now during the course, I received an email from Arthur & Suzy making some vague allusion to not going north, but changing the plan to head back to Nabadwip following the rendezvous for the snake ceremony that Sajal had arranged to take place immediately following the Navaratri fire sacrifice. This threatened to put a serious crimp in the ability to head up to the valley of flowers & Simla, as it begins to get cold soon up there. This was the first opportunity in all our trips to India to see these places due to our usual arrival being past the time of do-able weather.

And so they came to be known as "the loons", in due time, because following the initial email saying a change of plan was eminent, they dropped the line of communication, as they are want to do; (see 5 years previous "Art & Suzy wed in Nabadwip"). I agonized for the next 2 days over what to do, having sent off a volley of emails to them & receiving no response. I determined finally that I should stick to the original plan & go at least to Simla. With no further input to go on I felt that unless the ceremony could not be re-scheduled it could take place in the original November timing. Then lo & behold, they emailed from Banaras. They were on their way & we would be heading for someplace before Nabadwip, but not for as long; as we had to do the ceremony in this new time frame already determined to follow a 3-day fire sacrifice over the last days of Navaratri. Okay.

After much talk of our favorite Japanese restaurant on the ghat, it turns out his cuisine is not as shiny bright as I remembered it to be. On the positive side, however, we located another really good restaurant that was probably there all along, but unnoticed by us until this trip. It is located between the Hotel Yoga Niketan & Dayananda Ashram side. Seems it originally had ghat-front property, but there has been a huge causeway (walkway) constructed to run along the ghat for quite a distance; possibly half a kilometer or so, causing the restaurant called "something…Sanctuary" to be obscured from sight unless you're up on that causeway & happen to look down when passing by. We've got pics of it as we were taken with the décor, right off. We will use it as a model for our terrace dining in Nabadwip. The woman there can really cook & gives an excellent thali. The husband is a throwback to the hippy era of grandeur ala Beatles. He's been there for 30 years & only recently went back to Holland for his father's funeral.

And so, enter the loons. They arrived at the ashram a bit after noon when I had but one session left of the Naksatra course. The timing couldn't have been better. We determined to go to either the Valley of Flowers or Simla, as time would not allow for both. Meanwhile, Joseph (who had miraculously made it to the course) couldn't decide on whether to join us or go his own route. In the end, I encouraged him to carry on his way, as we had re-decided that it was just too damn much trouble to head up to Simla (having to go down to Delhi before going back up to Simla & then back down thru Delhi on the way to Calcutta. Also, I was beginning to feel a bit wane. We (Art & I) had to go to the Rishikesh train station to purchase one way fares from Haridwar to Delhi & then for the Rajdhani from Delhi to Calcutta for Suzy & I (our Indrail passes had not yet begun) & be had to reserve the berth for Arthur, as well. That was the beginning of the end of health for me – the autos were fully exhausting. Up until this point, I had been feeling surprisingly fit. In fact, I had been personally responsible for most of my course-mates visiting the ayurvedic vaidya in Rishikesh (near the taxi stand, across the street from the Madras Café) at the Shivananda Herbal store. My experience of his expertise I quietly bandied about. I had been stopping by his shop for years, every time we went up to Rishikesh, to buy various herbal remedies like ChyawanPrash & the like; but in all that time, I had not realized that the owner therein was a vaidya & all you needed to do was ask his son if he was in & voila, he would read your pulse. It was that simple. He can barely speak a word of English, but his son will clear up any misunderstandings. I began to feel very easy in my body after one day of taking what appeared & tasted like powdered charcoal with a hint of mildew, (not that I've had either of those two ingredients separately or together before). By the end of the 2nd & 3rd days I noticed such a remarkable easiness, the likes of which I had not seen in nearly 4 decades. I felt as though I was a child again. This was extraordinary. It turns out that this little old man running this herbal store for the past 47 years in the same location in Rishikesh is an expert in the creation of gold, mercury & diamond basas (rasayanas). Who would've thought?!