The USS Quad Damage

It’s the middle of the day, and both my parents and my brother are asleep after going to the gurdwara. My expectations of a holiday are gone from being hectic sightseeing to being lazy and slow paced. I can see the idea of being in “holiday mode” when coming back to work. It’ll be hard to adjust.

Having said that, I’ve been getting up earlier in the morning than I ever did when going to work, 7 – 8 am being the latest. I’m also shaving more regularly. Shaving doesn’t take that long if I do it every other day, but my beard grows so fast that if I miss a day, it takes half an hour to shave. This is why people see me with a beard at work. Half an hour in the morning isn’t a lot when I’m on holidays, so I’ve been shaving more often, which means it doesn’t take half an hour to shave. Hopefully this means I’m making a good impression on my relos.

All of whom have beards

I get up early here in part because the weather is freaking fantastic. It’s never too warm or too cold, and it hasn’t rained whilst we’ve been here. The wind is also perfectly still (in part, this is why the smog stays for so long, because the wind doesn’t carry it away). I used to wonder about all the fans in India, where Australia doesn’t really have any. Now I know – you need the fans to move the air around.

In Australia, in summer it’s so damn hot that I get no sleep until it cools down a bit, which is right in the morning. This means I wake up later. In winter, it’s so cold that when you’re supposed to get up, you don’t want to get out of bed and freeze your balls off.

The fact that I don’t have to go to work might also work in my favour when I’m on holidays.

Everywhere I go, I realise more and more that all my relatives are awesome. Attractive and smart, the nicest thing is that they’re all that and they remind me of… well… me! It just goes to show that my loserishness isn’t due to genetics, it’s just me that’s at fault.

In other news, if I was a girl, I’d be totally hottt! One of my cousins looks like a girl version of my brother.

I saw some old photos of myself and my parents when they were kids. It’s a strange emotion, because in Australia we have just us 4, and here my parents are showing off all their uni friends and where they studied when they were kids. My baby photos are… interesting. There’s a photo of my mum’s family, and you can tell where I get my eyes from. This might sound strange, but I can see myself in them, so it feels like I’m going to grow old and die. It’s not an entirely bad feeling.

What makes it bad is that all the relatives in my age group are getting married. Not an excellent benchmark to set for myself. Also, as close as I feel to them, there’s this unsettling thought that I don’t quite fit here either. Maybe that’s just normal. My brother is a hero wherever he goes.

I am in a special kind of hell when it comes to food. Before I left, I packed only tight fitting pants so that I wouldn’t eat too much. However, every meal here has been special for one reason or another, and I’ve gotten into the habit of finishing what’s on the plate. I’ll eat so much of my meal that I’ll go over into my ice cream stomach. Dinnertime arrives before I’ve finished digesting, so I’ll go into my second ice cream stomach.

Then they serve ice cream.

I’m writing this after the fact, so my memory may not be so good here. We arrived in Jamshedpur on the 30th, and as I write this we’re going back to Chandigarh. I hate the train system and the dodgy people who run it. Along with bad bookings, bribes, lies, hilariously late trains (over an hour at times), slow going, and bad hygeine, the fact that it soaks up so much time is the killer. We’ve spent perhaps 4 days of our trip so far on trains and in taxis.

One of the things you notice as you train through the country is that there’s a lot of arable land which is farmed. There are villages and cane and wheat fields all through the country. The villages still have houses made of straw. Visibility in these areas is good. The whole village probably smells like gober.

On the way up to Jamshedpur, we were continually fed. On the way back, we have to buy our own food in 2nd class. I’m sort of glad, because my habit of cleaning the plate means I ate way too much on the way over. I’m even more glad we don’t get fed a lot because in second class, the toilets are completely unmaintained. No TP, and the seat is broken. I’ll have to hold it for 30 odd hours.

Jamshedpur has a nicer city design than Chandigarh. It has fewer “city features” than Chandigarh, but the features which are there seem complete. Sidewalks have grass on them as opposed to wasted concrete and bits of the old sidewalk. The nicest thing about Jamshedpur is the fact that it has hills, and the city feels less like a grid city, although decent city planning is still not all there. This makes it seem a bit like Sydney, but with more smog and crappier standards. The house we’ll be living in at Jamshedpur is larger and better maintained than the one in Chandigarh, complete with a nice large garden and better watered house.

The relos here are from my mother’s side, and they’re pretty awesome as well. Each relative we go to meet we start off all “oh do we have to meet them?” and then we go and meet them and have a great time. My mum’s sister looks a lot like my mum, and shares some of her habits as well. She pretty much treated us as her own sons. She’s married to a doctor and has two sons who are in various stages of studying medicine.

Conversations aren’t quite the same as on my father’s side, where a university lecturer who teaches medicine (ish) used anal sphincter multiple times in conversation, while we were eating, but the chatter is still pretty good. We also have relatives who are of a similar age to me and my brother. They also seem a bit more “modern day” than my father’s side, who’s kids seem more traditional.

Today was spent mostly visiting relatives and wishing them well. We spent a bunch of time trying to be quick about visiting people, but eventually being coaxed first into coming inside, then into sitting, then tea and conversation, next thing the whole day is gone.

One of the big topics of the day was corruption. Good or bad? Discuss. (I ended up not really understanding whether corruption was a solvable problem or not).

A bunch of time was spent talking about my relatives. A lot of them are pretty awesome. Some of them are just plain witty, or nice, or really smart. My cousin’s wife is a statistician (either getting or has a PhD) who has done work on ballistics, reliability, and cryptanalysis. If I heard this correctly she’s built a FSM to create keys.

I will be talking more to her later.

To be honest, I wasn’t really paying attention most of the day. The night would go off with a bang. It really sounded like it could’ve been a war. During the height of people lighting firecrackers, you didn’t have a time where you didn’t hear a pop or a squeal or a boom. Various bright lights going off and neighbours all giggling and laughing as things went very right, or wrong.

Newer and larger rockets have their own casing, so they look like big cylinders with a fuse. Smaller rockets are kinda dangerous. Sometimes they don’t go off, and sometimes when they do they change trajectory to point across rather than up. One of my rather naughty nephews lit a rocket and threw it on the ground, laughing greefully. What followed was a slow-motion “oh shit” and I moved him out of the way and his dad threw the rocket across the street. It flew down the road at a bunch of kids lighting other firecrackers freaked the fuck out.

Much apologies later, the fun resumed.

The left-over cylinders from the big rockets were used to demonstrate the power of some of the bungers. You didn’t really need to demonstrate the power. Even when blowing them up from across the street, not only were they hilariously loud, but you could actually feel the shockwaves. They blew out the candles we lit around our home.

Anyway, we thought a demonstration would be useful, so we put a cylinder around the bunger and set it off. We never saw that cylinder again, so we tried again with a bigger cylinder. It flew in the air about 10m, then fell back down again.

Apparently there were even bigger bungers which have since been made illegal.

I had a good night’s sleep. High on the agenda was getting more Toilet Paper. Water is a scarce resource, and is only delivered until 10am in the morning. I think it resumes again in the evening. Between those two hours, you’re on your own. We have a water tank which keeps some water. Having said that, at no time during the day, even when water is directly delivered, is there any real pressure to the water itself. It feels very much like it’s using osmosis to move through the piping.

India is full of small businesses directly competing against one another. If you’re looking for a shoe shop, you’ll generally find a number of shoe shops next to each other. Brands, too, are generally “unknown”, even though they’ve gained recognition in their own right. Competing against all of these are the global players. It feels nice. A lot of businesses set up shop right outside a legitimate strip of commercial areas, for example, people selling things in the car park of the commercial strip. Whether you buy things from the car park or from inside one of the shops, it appears there’s a fair bit of hand calculation going on.

It took me a while to figure this out. As the guy’s adding things up, I’m wondering why he’s not just using a calculator, or just a cash register. Eventually it clicks, and the lack of a receipt confirms it. I wonder if all businesses are off the books like this or if there’s some way of tracking this stuff.

Chandigarh itself is a nice area. However, a lot of the work seems strangely half done. For instance, there are kerbs, but for some reason there’s a bunch of dirt and concrete mounted on the kerbs. You’d think that if there was a guy in charge of doing the kerbs, he wouldn’t just leave his crap lying around after he was done. Apparently corruption is the universal answer for that sort of thing around here.

One of the things I’m trying to learn to do is speaking hindi. Being around a bunch of people constantly speaking the language helps a lot, as does the fact that apparently my accent is untenable. It’s still hard going though. Strangely, it seems like I can understand more Hindi and Punjabi than my brother, but can’t speak as much of it.

One of the things we did was visit the factory which my relos own. They make bolts there, and even though that sounds simple it encompasses most of what we learnt in Engineering Science in High school. There’s various forming, threading, and other machines, a bunch of lathes and such for tool design, even a furnace for heat treatment. There’s also things for plating and case hardening.

Today, on the eve of Diwali, apparently all engineers celebrate this dude who was Rawan’s (the bad guy who gets killed on Dushera) Engineer. This guy was supposed to have designed and / or built his city. I like the idea that engineers respect this guy even though he was fighting for “the wrong team”. I hope that science and engineering can maintain this sort of respect and care for each other even if they’re on opposite sides of the war.

Eventually, we went shopping for the things we would need for Diwali. I remember markets having a lot more haggling. Maybe I used to go shopping with my more cheap-skatey relatives. The important thing for me here was the firecrackers. We bought a bunch of stuff totalling nearly $200. That’s a lot for a country where food is, on average, around $1 a head in a restaurant. We ended up with over 20Kg of explosives, ranging from things that spin around, things which go boom, things which go bigger boom, rockets, and things which spray fire into the night. Oh, and Sparklers.

I’m excited about tomorrow. For some reason I was worried that if I arrived too late, all the fireworks would’ve been bought out. Silly fear. Guys who sell explosives are awesome, and they never run out.

Looking at my nephews and the way they act (completely loco), as well as my relatives’ description of how me and my brother were as children, I’m starting to wonder if I’m adopted. The stories are all “yeah, and we were all this insane… except you Sunny, you just studied a lot”. Excellent.

I’m writing this at the end of day 3. This is harder than I thought it’d be. Getting time in front of the computer is possible, but getting regular time is hard. Also, it’s funny how many things you can do in a day. On day 2 we got to Delhi, and proceeded to drive up to Chandigarh. Chandigarh is a bit like the Campbelltown of New Delhi’s Sydney.

The first thing I noticed when hitting Delhi was the smell. You can see this cloud of pollution in the air from the plane, and when you descend below 1 km altitude, the smell comes right into the plane. Walking outside is the same thing. Visibility is like a ridiculous FOW in a computer with the graphics settings a little too low.

It’s so bad, when driving up to Chandigarh, we could look directly at the morning sun without destroying our eyes. I even took a couple of photos. It’s not until well in the afternoon that the sun starts looking normal, but even then the ambient light is very strange. It’s like a cloudy day, but the sun is out.

Delhi (and to some extent Chandigarh) at least seems like a tragedy of the commons par excellence. We went into a theme restaurant named “Haveli”, and it’s like walking into another world. Being a theme restaurant, it was fairly gaudy, and you’d think only tourists would go there, but the food was fairly good, so it was packed with (I assume) locals.

So, the amazing thing was as soon as you go past the gates (inside which is the parking lot), you immediately enter this atmosphere of… sanity. There are line markings for the parking spots, the area is well maintained, and there’s a ton of the “small thinking” you take for granted in Australia which is there again inside the walls of the restaurant. A lot of business owners in Chandigarh have taken to providing what I would see as “public goods” to benefit their business, like a make-shift bin outside a shop which sells ice cream, so you can throw the packaging away.

Another thing that gets you is how flat this area of India is. I mean it’s like dead flat. Circuit city style flat. As such the cities are in fact circuit cities. Houses are split up into “sectors” and things like that. It’s just vaguely amazing to be driving for such a long distance and never have to go past a hill. I felt like they’ve squandered a great opportunity with this great flat area, because in Australia so much effort and care needs to be taken with the design of stuff due to the interesting landscape. Weather is similarly very predictable (at least so far).

Speaking of driving a long distance, the drive was… fairly scary. A lot of people have stories about driving, so I’m not about to repeat that here, but basically it’s chaos. We had a fair few close calls, overtaking is done extremely close (like I wouldn’t want to get that close while parking, and we’re getting that close to other cars whilst driving at 90 kph), and whenever there’s a slowdown in traffic, instead of applying the breaks, people split up into “n” lanes, where there’s room for “n – 1” cars on that road, and ther’s line markings for “n/1.6” cars.

It’s interesting to see the amount of advertising in Delhi. A lot of people are working overtime to push their brands. It wasn’t so bad in Chandigarh, but in Delhi you can see that people are working really hard to get themselves into the mindset of a market that’s just waking up to brands, and is about to get really picky.

This might seem a bit like a journal. I’m sorry. I’ll try and make it interesting.

I’m coming to the end of the first day of my holidays. So far, that’s meant randomly busy times. “Doing stuff” tends to mean you lose track of time, so even conservative estimates have meant I just barely make it, from packing to cleaning up to locking up. Luckily, I planned conservatively for once. I think I’m learning to improve my timing. It bugs me that I often make people wait for me, either through a hopeless optimism, or trying to fit way too much into my schedule.

Before I left I made a point to see the Trevardies and wish ‘em the best for the new arrival. We ended up mostly talking about my trip, but it was because it’s been a while since we’ve caught up. This is partly busy-ness, partly laziness, partly distance. Still, it was good to see the high school guys again in a familiar setting. Like old times, but with this new and heartwarming twist. The baby is big now, and definitely feels like another entity inside her mum’s belly.

At the airport, we met a family friend who happens to teach English in high school. I tried to tell her of my disdain for fiction, but she wouldn’t hear a bar of it. She just shoved a book in my hands and told me I wouldn’t be able to put it down once I picked it up, guaranteed. I started reading and the writing started to bug me almost straight away. The ridiculous similes poured into every sentence, thick and near impossible to wade through.

It made me think about how much I prefer comics, because instead of telling me that someone’s “nose was red, like the nose of a man who’s spent far too long in the cold, his blood vessels trying their damndest to keep it from falling off”, you see a dude with a red fucking nose. It has a finality and conciseness about it that, with a few lines, describes far more than the complex shapes which comprise an alphabet.

It made me think about how much I prefer gaming to reading. How I’d much prefer to solve the main characters problem than be chained to their actions or inactions. Instead of listening to some guy’s whiny interlude, I can walk a little ways up his path and plant some proximity mines.

So many of the world’s problems can be solved with proximity mines.

We talked a little about Science fiction. I found I had to defend it, and she said “Star Wars” with this hate-filled fire spit. It’s hard to defend sci-fi when the most popular sci-fi is so terrible.

Could’ve been worse, she could’ve been talking about Battlestar Galactica.

I got in a plane next to a window seat. We were right near the wings, so we could see their aerolons (?) move about, as well as see the ground. It’s amazing how much the wings move during flight. Planes are awesome. I would really have pissed off the woman in the seat next to me, continually taking pictures and “ooh”ing and “aah”ing at every little thing that happened. I think the planes have more moving parts than they really need, just to impress people. The woman next to me (window seat) did this little cross-her-heart thing.

Got me thinking about the number of man-hours put into the plane. From the engineers (materials, structural, electrical), the testing in a variety of places, through to the maintenance dudes, not to mention the Pilots, who not only need a ton of flight hours just to be qualified to fly those things, but also (between them) have set up processes to cater for practically every scenario. To me, flying in an aeroplane is like watching an Opera or a play, and the ticket price is worth it for that alone. Take-offs and landings were a bit noob, but overall an awesome experience. The lady next to me should believe in humans more, and their ability to achieve things together. I think if people reckoned God was a mere tremor compared to the earthquakes of human endeavour, we’d co-operate a lot more.

So despite being awesome, the plane ride was long, but they had recent movies and a screen per person. Despite being packed like sardines, I got to see some movies I hadn’t managed to catch at the cinemas:

• Meet Dave – Hilarious. A lot of the humour was expected, but it was great nonetheless. The delivery kills it, and it’s good to see Eddie Murphy being funnier than his brother again (I’m Rick James… bitch).
• Get Smart – Not funny so much, but still a good watch. brings back memories, and they’ve got a different take.
• Hancock – Good movie, and adds an excellent realism to superheroes, but aims a touch too high, and doesn’t really get at the things it’s trying to say. They may have gotten further if they didn’t try and explain his back story.
• Incredible Hulk – I’ve liked Eric Bana since the Full Frontal days, and in some ways watching him is like hoping that maybe one day Micallef will be in a Hollywood movie. I didn’t want to see the Marvel re-creation because I knew it would be much better than the one where Eric is the Hulk. It is better, and it’s worth it better. It makes the other movie redundant.

I just got to Singapore Airport and I’m waiting for a flight here. My hayfever’s gone off something severe. There’s like this dust in this part of the airport. It’s a constant damp smell and gives me a runny and blocked nose. I’m thinking India’s going to be worse. This worries me, because if this was a story that someone else was writing, my hayfever right now would be foreshadowing.

The toilets here are completely retarded. The one I was in kept on flushing repeatedly. Everything here is “automated” which means no touching required. This is scary. I had un-coordinated toilet moments.

Good Game started off being one of the worse shows on TV. It probably stayed this way for a few seasons, after which they got rid of that damn monkey and the show started getting good.

Top Gear Australia is now on the air, and it has that monkey stench. A lot of people were really disappointed from the first episode. I must say the second fared much better in my view, but I missed the first half of it. Some people say it’s the fact that the BBC have a lot more money. Others say it’s way too similar to Top Gear, with the same characters. All we know is it’s called… wait hang on I’m losing my train of thought.

It’s true, the BBC do have more money. It allows them to put on more spectacular shows, as opposed to the “dip a guy in water; attract sharks” thing which TGA has had to do. However, I don’t know if that adds an awful lot to the show. I liked the expensive bits, but the cheaper things were also fairly fun.

A stronger point is that the characters are the same. Warren is James, complete with being directionally challenged, and the most eloquent of the bunch. Steve is Richard, complete with the driving skills and stupid smile. Charlie is Clarkson. Actually, I think this isn’t too bad, and in fact I think Warren and Steve actually pull off James and Richard. Charlie just can’t pull of Clarkson. He’s loud and obnoxious, but he just doesn’t have the je ne sais quois. Still, I think they’ll learn, and they’ll probably become more themselves than emulating the people on TGUK.

Both points are valid, I think it’s just the fact that the group can’t ad-lib well enough just yet, and the whole thing actually seems scripted, even though Clarkson’s bunch seem to pull off the whole script thing rather well.

I also think the show’s probably got broader appeal. Whilst Aussie car culture is tautological to us, it’s likely fascinating to people in other countries. We’ll have a lot more challenges with Utes, we’ll have different cars, and so on. This won’t really seem all that grand to us, but imagine UK viewers seeing it. They’ll be thinking “that’s a distinctly Australian show, that is. More tea Cedric?”.

¹ I know I’m writing like 12 posts in as many minutes, but bear with me. Looking at this historically, If I mix up types of posts I end up reading bits of a good post and I’m thinking “What the fuck is the rest of this drivel. It belongs in a whole ‘nother post”. I’m doing the “whole ‘nother post” here.

I’ll be going to India later this month. I’ll write more posts and upload some pics with “the haps”. Hopefully it won’t be a lame journal, but will contain reviews of Indian television, which I will call lame because the actors are all fucktwads, except Indian Idol, which I will claim is better because Indians sing better than everyone else.

Two and a half men is a show with Charlie Sheen et al, and my brother loves it. He’s an idiot, though, and the show sucks balls.

The show is about a guy named Charlie (Charlie Sheen. I’m guessing it’s because he can’t actually remember a character name if one was given to him), his brother Alan… etc. The Charlie character is a “free-wheeling” guy who writes jingles for a living, somehow makes a great living from it, and is a ladies man. His character literally spends his time getting paid and laid.

“Alan”, his brother, comes to live with him after his divorce. He’s anally retentive. He’s a loser, he doesn’t get any. He’s a pathetic egotistical man with no life or career, yet he spends most of his time telling Charlie the difference between right and wrong.

This is less a “situational comedy”, and more just a “situation”. If I was Julia Louis-Dreyfus I’d be waving my hands in little circles as I said that. Both guys are really unlikeable. All the other characters are… really unlikeable. It’s got like three jokes, all about sex.

It reminds me of Road Runner, where Charlie is the road runner (except instead of running away he has sex (?)) and Alan is Wile E Coyote (except instead of not catching the road runner he doesn’t have sex (?)). The joke gets old, and unlike Road Runner, the delivery here isn’t sterling.

I’m not really sure what people see in this show.

Google Trends shows us that whilst we may be searching for more awesome things, we aren’t succeeding in finding them.

... That’s about as far as my analysis goes.

And by that I mean modern media fails at journalism.

So Russell Crow’s idea is to give everyone in America, or 300 million people, one million dollars each at a cost of 300 million(sic) dollars, or less than the 700 billion dollars proposed for the Wallstreet bailout. Now obviously he didn’t mean 300 million dollars because that’d be one dollar to every person and it was a live interview so give the guy a break. He showed his working so use your head.

However the media seems to have focused on how 300 million times one million equals 300 trillion and is thus greater than the 700 billion bailout.

The problem I have is that if the media had put any sort of thought into it they’d have realised that he probably got confused by the difference between the definition of a billion in the short and long scale number definitions. Which in the long scale one million or 1×10^{6 multiplied by 300 million or 300×10}6 actually equals 300 billion or 300×10^12.

Yes 300×1012 is however greater than the 700×10^{9 dollars proposed for the bail out but in his defense less than the 700×10}12 Crow thought it was going to cost.

Though it is entirely possible he’s doesn’t have a clue when it comes to money as evidenced by the financial problems of the South Sydney football side earlier this year.