Day 147 - The Space We Are

_Captain’s Log, StarDate 2007.12.01-11.03_

“Give all that you can be
All you leave behind
Feed the state
That is in your mind”

-Ronski Speed, “The Space We Are”

Spent the better part of today dealing with one of my greatest nemeses (does nemesis really have a plural?), which is packing - the unsolved optmization problem of fitting in a seemingly infinite amount of stuff into a finite amount of space. I need to pick up some more stuff tomorrow, and hopefully everything should fall into space (I mean place).

Stumble upon an incredible movie called Legends of the Fall on TV at night. Perfect for a winter night.

Day 112 - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

_Captain’s Log, StarDate 2007.10.27-01.33_

It’s Saturday… call your friends, shake a leg. Or sleep till late afternoon and watch two movies. Which is what I did, in an attempt to unwind from the crazy week I just had. I watched a bit of A Few Good Men in the afternoon. Late at night I stumbled across a masterpiece from Michel Gondry (who has directed some Chemical Brothers’ videos) called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The movie has a gripping story and even more gripping visuals. Besides, it stars two very good actors - Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. Don’t miss it for the world. I didn’t.

Day 105 - Back Laid

_Captain’s Log, StarDate 2007.10.20-01.55_

My back has given way again, and I had spent the day time-sharing between the sofa and the bed. In the evening I watched The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. The cars were fantastic, the acting non-existent. Nobody can stand up to Paul Walker

I found a funny kind of coincidence between the guy who finds himself in an alien city (Tokyo; Montreal in my case) and suddenly has access to a powerful car (an Evo; a Mazda 6 in my case). Interesting. Also the part where the guy is trying to explain the concept of drifting: pull on the handbrake and step down on the accelerator. The look of incomprehension on the would-be driver’s face was probably the same that I had when I attended rally school and was told for the first time to pull the handbrake to control the car’s direction… (”What?! Pull the handbrake?! Are you nuts?!”)

Organization, Productivity

I’ve always argued that life is all about unlimited tasks (or possibilities, if you prefer) and limited time. You can either do a lot of things (and still have some left over), or you can do a few things and do them well. As Gandalf the Grey says in The Lord of the Rings, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world Frodo, besides good and evil”.

In the end, all that matters is what you did with your time. Success is always projected. “Misdirection. What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes”. That was Gabriel Shear in Swordfish.

Day 098 - Saturday Night Beaver

_Captain’s Log, StarDate 2007.10.13-16.44_

OK, forget about the part about staying up all night. Evidently, my body was so tired that without an alarm, I woke up at 4.30 in the evening. Wow. I must really have been tired not to notice. We had a, well, meal at around 6. We watched Ronin at night. I’m going to have a lot to catch up on tomorrow.

Day 091 - Shifted Rooms

_Captain’s Log, StarDate 2007.10.05-01.21_

Thanks to the weakening US economy, in a bid to cut costs, from now on we’re going to share rooms in groups of two. So Mr. P and I moved into a “Honeymoon Suite”, which fortunately has a bedroom separate from the living room. The living room sofa has a pull out bed so we don’t have to sleep in the same room (although there are two separate beds in the bedroom). Unfortunately, there is only one bathroom (and also only one kitchenette). There are already a lot of conflicts between other people in other groups (especially where food tastes don’t match).

I managed to get us a room on the top (6th) floor, which has an excellent view of Montreal, including Mount Royal. I guess I’m going to pick up some good habits now, since I’ve got a commitment to free up the bathroom at a fixed time everyday… no more resetting the alarm in the morning, no more lazing around in bed till the last minute and no more skipping breakfast for that extra 15 minutes of sleep

I stayed up late watching 2 Fast 2 Furious (again) and making some phone calls back to India after that. I have a long day tomorrow but somehow I’m growing more and more allergic to sleep these days…

Day 057 - 1000 Islands and Toronto

_Captain’s Log, StarDate 2007.09.01-00.55_

We started very early and nearly missed the tour bus because the taxi showed up late. Our first stop was 1000 Islands near Kingston, Ontario. It is a chain of 1,865 islands divided between the US and Canada and home to some of the most fantastic houses I have ever seen. After the boat cruise which lasted a little over an hour, we had lunch in Kingston at a Bangladeshi restaurant. In the evening, we reached Toronto and visited the Town Hall, the Parliament and then the famous CN Tower, at 553.33 metres the world’s tallest free-standing structure.

After a short shopping spree at Chinatown, we headed back to our hotel and watched an old black-and-white western on TV (most likely “Return of the Badmen (1948)”). That was without doubt one of the high points of my trip… it’s been ages since I’ve seen a black-and-white movie, and this was probably the first western I’ve ever seen.

Day 043 - On Site, and the End of an Odyssey

_Captain’s Log, StarDate 2007.08.18-01.38_

I didn’t go out anywhere today. I woke up late, had brunch, finished watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, and got down to some serious work on this site. I have mixed opinions about the movie, although the book is one of my all-time favourites. I guess that considering the fact that it came out in 1968, the movie is pretty good for its time. One of the glaring characteristics is the lack of a continuous soundtrack, so much the standard these days. Where present, the background soundtrack is either western classical (The Blue Danube and Zarathustra recur often), which IMHO doesn’t go very well with the futuristic nature of the movie, or some insane, spooky, high-pitched, almost alien, latin chanting.

For that matter, very little of the movie actually has any spoken dialogue. Having grown up on a diet of contemporary Sci-Fi, NASA, Electronic Dance Music and Winamp Visualization Plugins like Geiss, and because of the fact that the book is much more vivid in description, I’m glad my imagination had conjured up much better images than what the movie crew could put together with their 1960’s technology. Nevertheless, it was ground-breaking for its time and incidentally, the last movie made about man landing on the moon before man actually landed on the moon (or did he? ;-)).

I don’t think I’ll ever have the patience to watch it again, though. I’ve read the book (infact the entire series) several times and wouldn’t mind doing it a couple of times more. Sir Arthur C. Clarke has a way with words is unparalleled and an imagination that was boundless.

Movies

Everything to do with this time-and-money consuming form of entertainment goes here. Microwave the popcorn, turn down the lights and grab a comfortable seat…

Resources:

• IMDb.com - “The Internet Movie Database, Earth’s Biggest Movie Database”
• The Sci-Fi Movie Page - “Reviews of both classic and more recent sci-fi movies and DVDs, plus dozens of clips and trailers, downloadable scripts, articles, message boards, and more”

Day 042 - Blackout

_Captain’s Log, StarDate 2007.08.17-01:58_

Something really unexpected happened today - we came back to our hotel rooms to find a note saying that due to emergency repairs being carried out by Hydro-Quebec (the power company), there will be power interruption/no power between 11.30 PM and 7.00 AM. Wow! For all you people out there who think Bangalore/India’s power situation is bad, check this out… we’re far better!

I wasn’t really sure if I would survive the night without fresh oxygen from the A/C, but I took a chance anyway. Guess what, I survived.

We also semi-celebrated Sunil’s birthday before we ran into our rooms to avoid bumping into things in the dark. I had quite an experience watching DooM on the laptop in pitch dark. I just loved the part when the camera turned into the First Person Shooter view, it was so much like the days in school when I used to stay up all night playing Quake in the dark so that my parents wouldn’t find out. My experiments with modding and experimenting with Quake in the dark gave me the fast typing speed that I have today. Yes, it’s true - the only way to really speed up your typing is to type in the dark… sorry Dad, Typing Tutor really didn’t help (What *did* help was your insistence that I use the right fingers for the right keys, always).

Quake used to scare the hell out of me, I used to dream of it till many years after I stopped playing it. Sometimes I still do, and maybe one day I might actually get down to finishing it (I kept losing my saved games because of crashed hard disks and had to keep starting all over again). My best experience with Quake ever was the night when I was playing in the dark as usual, and there was a *real* [minor] earthquake. My first reaction was to think that (1) Hell really does exist, (2) it has descended to Earth and (3) I’m soon going to meet my maker. I don’t think I have ever felt that much fear in my life ever. I don’t think any amount of sophisticated computer equipment can recreate that fear. I mean, how many people are lucky enough to experience a real quake while playing Quake, and live to tell the story?