bucket bathing

Oh, hi there. You just caught me finishing a bucket bath... "what's that!?" you ask? Bucket baths are how you bathe when your lodgings lack bath tubs or shower heads. Basically you fill a big bucket with water then use a smaller bucket to pour the water over yourself while trying to lather/rinse/rub at the same time. I've been working on my technique these last few days but I still have a number of problems with the process.

• It's hard to get the temperature of the bucket water just right -- at any given time you can only add hot water or cold water to the bucket, so it's a delayed feedback system with a fixed deadline (the bucket edge). After a few days practice I'm now able to get a satisfactory temperature, but doing so requires diligence and sustained monitoring of bucket temperature.


• Perhaps the greatest mystery in my mind about bucket bathing is how I'm supposed to wash my arms. I generally pour with one hand and rub with the other, but on the arms I can either pour with no rubbing or try to awkwardly pour onto the arm holding the bucket while rubbing the arm down gently so I don't splash water everywhere. It's very inefficient; I think I use 1/4 of the bucket water on just my arm & shoulder regions.


• Finally, bucket bathing requires me to stand naked in the middle of a bathroom and pour water on myself. Standing in a running shower is mentally acceptable, but standing around naked without water constantly running over me is strangely unsettling. It's clearly a silly cultural thing, but I'm having trouble adjusting.

While we're on the matter of washroom cleansing, let me just answer the one question I know you've all been asking yourselves: No, they don't use toilet paper in India. They instead use, you guessed it, buckets of water. No, no, you don't sit in the bucket; you pour the water down your backside.
I'm fine with about 3/4ths of this method -- feel free to read an extended critique of toilet bucket system in my new book entitled OK, My Butt is Clean and Dripping Wet... Now What?.

getting here

Getting to India was surprisingly straightforward. I caught a direct flight from JFK to Mumbai which was ~14 hours (which, for the record, is about how long it takes to get to Korea if you go the other direction) and meant no worrying about missed connections. The flight was totally full (11 stand-bys didn’t make it) and Delta had to pull the “we’re overbooked and need a volunteer to give up their seat" game. I ended up sitting next to what I hope was a newly married couple – an Indian man and a white woman who looked like Alf Mushpie from Bloom County, except that she was overly reverential to her husband (e.g. unwrapping his food and feeding him) for the entire flight. This weirded me out and I was in the window seat so it was all napping, New Yorker, and seat-back video entertainment for me.

Baggage claim reminded me how atypical an Indian tourist I am. Neither a returning native, nor a dedicated tourist, I was the owner of the sole bag on the conveyor belt not stuffed to the point of bursting. I probably could have survived with a single carry on if I'd wanted to, but I'd been warned that I would need room for bringing things back. Failing to fall in a typical classification felt a bit weird and led to some short lived introspection, but at least it made it easy to pick out my one gaunt bag from the other black suitcases labeled "PATIL."

Mumbai's airport has undergone major renovations recently and the finished product is much cleaner and tourist friendly than the the old airport, which was beige, green, and brown and patrolled by soldiers who assumed you spoke Hindi and were casually armed with assault rifles. Customs were unexpectedly easy -- in the past I've entered India with my mom who always has 2 bags full of gifts and pockets full of gold (to be made into jewellery), but this time I was alone and carrying nothing but clothes and some books. There was also some guy arguing with the x-ray machine operator (something about how tax payer's are either harrassed too much or too little, I wasn't quite sure) so I don't think he even looked at my stuff. Between exiting the plane and finding my parents outside, the only words I exchanged with anyone were "Thank you" to the passport control guy.

As I made my way out the airport, I started to wonder if some how India had transformed since my last visit three years ago. Maybe Mumbai, like its airport, was now cleaner, friendlier, and less scary. Then I walked outside and realized India hadn't changed... it was just how I remembered it: hot, humid, utterly confusing and overflowing with people.

indian arrival

It’s 7am and I’ve been mostly awake for the last few hours, thanks to nine and a half hours of jet lag compounded by 14 hours of fitful sleep on the plane. My family is gradually waking up – my father and my grandparents are already busying themselves, readying for the day – in the various parts of my grandfather’s apartment where the eight of us are staying for the next few days. On the way over I was bit by the desire to write, so here I am tapping away on my old Dell Latitude laptop, a tech hand-me-down recently brought over by my parents, just like I used to when I pounded out weekly columns in college.
As bodies and bodies of better-written work can testify, traveling often entails learning more about yourself and where you come from than it does about where you’re going. No matter how many trips I’ve made, this is how I feel every time I visit India. Seeing as I no longer have my own newspaper column, I’ll be posting my thoughts (the interesting, intriguing, and the insipid) here over the next two weeks.

mid-october weather

Feeling cold in Northern CA? Come on over to NYC for some more pleasant weather.

me + microsoft's new search

Microsoft launched a major update to "Live Search" so, being the vain techie I am, I did a little vanity search to see their results:


The first result for my name is for a term paper I wrote my senior year of undergrad, which is appears to be more important than my undergrad personal website. Also apparently you can find me on eBay, which certainly good news for those of you who've been dying to get your hands on me.

Taking a look at Google's results:


First result is this blog, second is my undergrad website, third is my master's thesis. No ads. Sadly neither search engine has picked up on my current homepage, so there's still work to be done for both... Akshay Patil, Akshay, Patil -- there, that should do it.

(To round out the coverage: Yahoo thinks my last name is a misspelling of "Patel" & Ask.com gets my undergrad website as result 1, but has a spam blog as result 3)

now in 2D

My mom isn't a fan of the photo I posted earlier, so hopefully she'll like this one better. It's what I would look like if I were a Simpsons character (designed on the Simpsons Movie website). The eyes are a bit big, but then again, it's a cartoon character.

in 95% better shape than previously suspected

I ran 10 miles with Kushal yesterday. I'm pretty sure that's significantly further than I've ever run before and both Kushal and I were impressed with how well I held up ("annoyingly in shape" were Kushal's words =).
Much to my surprise I woke up this morning feeling perfectly fine with the exception of my knees, which are killing me. I've regretted living on the 5th floor of a walk-up for the last day, let me tell you.

origins

Enough people still ask that it seems necessary to write another post explaining the title of this blog. My father and grandfather are both big fans of a Danish mathematician named Piet Hein who wrote a series of short, light poems called Grooks in the '50s and '60s. (!) is an allusion to the Grook:


AN ODE TO MODESTY

Talking of successful rackets
modesty deserves a mention.
Exclamation marks in brackets
never fail to draw attention.

updates

I get flak for not updating this blog often enough, so here I am... updating. I tend to over-expose myself to the internet through less direct means these days: flickr, facebook, twitter, etc. See q00p.net for all your ak-stalking needs.

Anyways, I'm sitting in the Long Beach Airport headed back to New York after a short romp through CA for Man Diego (photos), Work, and Mother's Day. I've been traveling a bit these days, including trips to Holland/Spain and Boston (Go Sox!), but I think I'll have a good month or two of staying put in New York City after this, which should be nice.

Outside of traveling, I've been helping friends work on a continuing side project of mine called PartyChat, going to concerts (Honeycut, Snow Patrol, Priscilla Ahn, etc...), exploring Manhattan, watching TV, eating cupcakes... the usual stuff. My point-and-shoot camera is busted, so I haven't been taking as many photos as I'd like to...
I don't think there's anything more riveting to say about my life. I'd like to get back to writing long-winded rambly reflections on subjects of no value, like I used to, so watch this space or unsubscribe from this feed, depending on your feelings on the matter.

Hrm, guess that'll have to satisfy people's hunger for the moment since it looks like my plane's about to start boarding. More updates later, maybe.
P.S. Included photo is courtesy of my new company-issued MacBook Pro -- I took the photo something like 2 minutes after I got it. I still love shiny new technology.

help me.... stalk you.

I recently updated my "homepage" to pull in recent items from the hodgepodge of websites I use. There was some interest from others as to how I did it, so here's the skinny.

Google Reader lets you share RSS feeds using "clips" (javascript you paste into your page's html source). If you specify "Color scheme: None" then the output of the clip is formatted like everything else on your page. I just created clips for each website I use that exports an RSS feed and let Google Page Creator do the rest.

Mihai then gave some additional tips: you can specify a feed clip without actually subscribing to it and you can hide the little "Read more" link at the bottom of each feed. To hide the "Read more" link, include the following style definition somewhere above the clip:

<style>
.reader-publisher-module .f {display: none}
</style>

This instructs webbrowsers to ignore the section of the page that has the link. To specify a feed without subscribing to it, change the clip to look like:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/publisher.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/reader/public/javascript/feed/http://akpatil.blogspot.com/atom.xml?n=2&callback=GRC_p%28%7Bc%3A%27-%27%2Ct%3A%27%27%2Cs%3A%27false%27%7D%29%3Bnew%20GRC"></script>

And you're set.

i want to cry.

This has to be one of the saddest customer service conversations I've ever listened to: Vcents (transcript). Warning: those of you who are sensitive to inconceivably stubborn stupidity may be offended.

more bar

As previously menioned, I went to BarCampNYC2 a few weeks ago. It turns out Fred Stutzman wrote a blog post about the talk/discussion I hosted entitled "Monetizing Social Networks." This is pretty cool -- not just because I read Fred's blog, but because I actually first heard of BarCamp through an earlier post of his.

Anyways, it turns out his post about the session was "dugg," (digg article here) which is a testament to the whiz-bang job he did summarizing and analyzing the discussion, as well as to the amount of interest there is in the tech community on this subject. Now I don't have to feel like a tech-nerd-poser when I'm sportin' my free BarCampNYC2 t-shirt.

it's been a while

but this is so totally me.

i thought there was a bar involved...

So I went to BarCampNYC2 this weekend, which is less exciting than it sounds (camp!? bar!? sweet!), but still a good time. In a nutshell, BarCamp is a bunch of (somewhat) geeks getting together and talking about (somewhat) geeky things in (and this is where the false advertising comes in) somewhere other than a bar*. Discussion topics ranged from Pervasive Games (hosted by Dens) to "Hacking the Long Tail" to "Xquery Redux" (whatever that means). I led a little discussion on monetizing social networks which was fun -- a number of people there were actually running their own websites and were grappling with that very problem and had lots of good insight to offer.

In the spirit of geeks getting together to talk about geeky things, the entire (un-)conference was documented on a variety of web 2.0 sites, all tagged with "barcampnyc2". In particular, you can see everyone's photos on flickr, watch videos of some of the talks on Google Video, or read what other people had to say via Technorati.

* BarCamp gets its name from FooCamp. "Foo" & "Bar" are the traditional names given to throw-away variables when programming.
Photo is of the free shirt given to attendants. We do love them tech swag.

I always knew math was involved

Which Is All About the Unknowns

Female tourist: I don't get it. This isn't a square, it's like... triangular.
Male tourist: No, no, they just call it that because... well... it's like... a square... a square of people. I don't know, it has something to do with algebra.

--Times Square

Overheard by: Luke

via Overheard in New York, Sep 14, 2006

the pink panther, resux

I'm on a Greyhound bus on my way to Wooster, MA and they're playing Steve Martin's The Pink Panther. Man it sucks. If the video store has any any Sellers version (except maybe Trail of the Pink Panther, which was made with a dead Sellers), or even the Benigni follow up, pick up one of those instead. Please. I can't play my music loud enough to make Martin's Inspector Clouseau tolerable.

(FWIW, Revenge of the Pink Panther has one of two movie scenes that has made me laugh so hard that I couldn't breathe)

Even though it's technically "reality television," Morgan Spurlock's 30 days on FX is amazing, compelling television.

back to beta

I never could tell anyone what exactly I was working on at blogger.com, but now a year's worth of work is finally coming to fruition and beta.blogger.com has just launched (details) with this being the first public post ever made on the new system!

Excuse me while I go celebrate =)

blog this: TIME Magazine -- Numbers -- Aug. 7, 2006

TIME Magazine Archive Article -- Numbers -- Aug. 7, 2006:

36% Percentage of Americans surveyed last year who said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in 2003

50% Percentage of Americans surveyed this year who say that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded in 2003