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Indian Moments, Part 3
Indians refer to Native North Americans as Red Indians. We ordered bottled water to our table and it was…Foster’s branded. Foster’s branded water. It would seem kind of okay with, say, Coca-Cola, if they put their brand on water, but a beer company putting its brand on water is just plain suspect. An Indian told…
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Gmail Subject Lines Auto-complete Hilarity
Thankfully, the browsers I use save the subject lines I have used over the past few years. I paused when I saw one of these in auto-complete, and then went and captured a bunch more. These are both nostalgic, and hilarious. Sometimes I remember the context, and some time I cannot.
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Indian Moments, Part 2
Apparently, if you get high marks on an exam, your face gets put up on a poster in town. Indians find it hilarious and wasteful that I use toilet paper after going to the bathroom, instead of the ubiquitous squirter hose in every toilet. (As we’re leaving a Chinese restaurant to go on a weekend…
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Indian High School Dance on a %#$@ing School Bus
So this past weekend, I went on a visit to Kodaikanal, a hill station in Tamil Nadu south of Bangalore. 2100 metres elevation baby! (minus the snow I’m used to expecting at that elevation). The air was amazing. I went with the same three other students from France and Switzerland I visited Hampi the previous…
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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.
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Indian Moments
“You are Christian, yes?” “Well, no…I’m not really anything.” “Oh. What are your parents?” “I think my Mom was Lutheran a long time ago, which is a type of Christianity.” “So who do you pray to?” “Uh, no one?” “Indians are very religious.” “Drinking is part of your culture, yes?” “Well, I wouldn’t say its…
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The Joys and Guilt of Servitude
After I got off the plane in Bangalore on May 3rd, 2010, I followed emailed instructions to look for a certain “Mr. Manas” at the gate. Exiting from the air-conditioned airport into the outside world was the usual tropical shock. It’s as if you are remembering again what hot is really like. When I recovered…
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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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The Keanu Effect
I have pretty crazy dreams. I’ll try to describe the one from last night using adjectives like “crazy”, “strange” as little as possible. In the dream, I was going through a sequence that repeated at least 10 times before it changed. I don’t want to say it was “like” anything that I didn’t actually feel…
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Distributed Disc Tossing: The Value of Jerks
My department had a BBQ on Toronto Centre Island last Sunday. I am a frequent Ultimate Frisbee player, so I brought my disc to toss around. Some others did too, so we had an M tossers and N discs situation. I had just started the last course of my Master’s the week before, Distributed Computing,…