How a Strike Ruined my Weekend

This past weekend (June 26th and 27th), me and two other ex-pats in Bangalore (French, Italian) decided to go to Cochin on the west coast of India. After spending most of my time at the 900 meter elevation of Bangalore, I was really excited to get down to sea level and touch the Indian Ocean [...]

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This is What A Day of Gesture Design Looks Like

After spending a day designing a gesture detection algorithm, I took a look down at my paper and noticed that it looked almost art-like, if you didn’t know the origin. I decided to humbly share them with you for your educational and aesthetic benefit, my dear readers.

Comics Cafe: possibly the best spot in Bangalore

As I think I’ve already said, it is hot in India. Bangalore is known for having the nicest weather. In fact, it was recently rated the nicest place to live for ex-pats. However, it is still crazy hot. There isn’t a day for the next few weeks that has a high forecast under 30 degrees [...]

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My Morning Commute in Bangalore, India

This was too entertaining not to share: A combination of jet lag and a cold had me pretty shell-shocked after I took this trip the first time. But, now it has simply become amusing. For extra-awesome fans, you can follow along on this finely-crafted Google Map embedding with directions. I can definitely guarantee that the [...]

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2010 Post-Holiday Reading List

Thanks to the deluge of the holidays, I now have an enormous physical collection of items to read/watch/play. Here’s a picture (Click for full size):

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Research in Action 2009

Tommorow, Tuesday November 17th is my department’s Research in Action day. Think of it as a science-fair-like event, but without anu judging or prizes. Basically, its a chance for us computer science graduate students to show off what we have been working outside of regular conferences. The formal description of my project is: The consequences [...]

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Blog Entry Ideas

I keep a bunch of text files on my cellphone that contain random ideas I get while on the go, categorized such as ‘Books I want to write’, ‘Funny ideas’, ‘Directives’, ‘Improv Ideas’, ‘To read/watch/play’. One of these files is ‘Blog entry ideas’, a collection of stuff I wanted to write or rant about but [...]

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Mathematical Recreations – Tetris

So, I was doodling while watching an episode of The Wire, and I came across this curiousity. Let’s look at Tetris pieces, from the popular video game Tetris. Another way to define these is the set of arrangements of four squares where you can travel from one square to any other given square by shared [...]

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boodly boodly boodly Boodly (the sound of a power up)

So I’ve moved to Toronto and started my Master’s in Computer Science. I’m living in a basement bachelor apartment only 15 minutes walk from school, surrounded by a variety of multi-cultural restaurants. In my building, The Bahen Centre for Information Technology, I have an office (cubicle, really) in the Dynamic Graphics Project on the fifth [...]

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Wizard of Oz in South Park

In Human-Computer Interaction studies, we often simulate new interfaces in experimental trials before actually putting the effort into making them. Sometimes this simulation is interactive, like Human Media Lab’s Display Objects, and sometimes it’s a crappy non-interactive piece of styrofoam (like the first prototype for the iPod). Although the device is non-interactive, we can pretend [...]

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