The Lair

Concurrent with the screening of Gremlins on free to air TV for the past few weeks, the electronic locks in the department failed mysteriously last weekend. When this happens, campus security can either call someone and get it fixed or they can cop out and lock the department up the old fashioned way. Guess which option they took ? Ah me, the bleak reality of a weekend without internet access.

And the gremlins took to LaTex as well - a few weeks ago, I was struggling with two column formatting and images on Microsoft Word. This time, the struggles have shifted to LaTex. About as frustrating to write a paper in LaTex as in Word, on the whole, except for two things. There are loads more LaTex experts around here than there are people who know how to do Word well - and also, perhaps unsurprisingly, there is an aura of eliteness in doing your paper in the less well known typesetting format. People tend to excuse minor overflow bugs and so on when they realize you’ve done it this way - it’s like using a typesetting language instead of the evil monopolist’s Office wordprocessor confers a few brownie points.

And somewhat shockingly, I actually pretended I had a social life (outside IRC and IM) and went out to dinner last night. Highlight of the evening was some strange Mexican tequila. Strange only in that I am not well informed about the varieties that are available and my tequila planet consists of Jose Cuervo and that awful rotgut which smells of turpentine and masquerades as tequila (People in the building trade tend to call that sort of liquid paint-remover) Yep, the same rotgut that is ultra cheap and come with a cute plastic sombrero covering the bottle top. This particular tequila was nothing like it - slightly more uh .. dignified presentation and it smelt fantastic. There is also something to be said for using garlic salt instead of plain salt - I quite liked the taste combination of the tequila coating the garlic salt crystals on my tongue - followed by lime juice concentrate which came out of a bottle. A stickler for tradition, that’s me.

Oddly enough, we avoided all conversation about anything computer science related for the entire evening, which has to be something of a record. Not that there is anything wrong with chattering obsessively about the latest GCC or the merits of one Linux distribution over another at the top of our voices, but ordinary talk about things other than computing make for a nice change. Need to do that more often.

And despite having a seemingly Sisyphean series of deadlines ahead of me, I’m going to take some time out tonight and watch Rome. The reviews that I’ve seen so far describe it as a depiction of 50 BC Romans, filled with gratuitious violence, nudity and sex. They had me at gratuitious violence, the nudity and sex are just extras. This screening might even compell me to resume an orderly read of Gibbon’s work - I just scanned through the parts covering the Caesars I knew of when I read the first time, so I probably lost a lot of the details.

Update:Hmm. Have I fixed the permalink now ? A post titled gremlins has problems with the permalink. How appropriate. And no, I still can’t figure out what went wrong.

I have returned from a trip on a crowded (as in, standing room only) express train… in a carriage where the air conditioning was broken and ventilation was nonexistent. This is with temperatures hovering around about the 30C mark. I know some people (you fricking fetishists!) may like the smell of beer, several expensive perfumes intermingled with sweat and several other odours which I dared not analyze. I don’t belong to that category. Throw in a hot and humid train carriage into that malodourous mix and you’re pretty much looking at a bad travel experience. In fact, if anyone had slathered butter over me and dipped me in some marinade (hahahaha, incoming imagery alert ? sorry), I’d be pretty much fit for eating about now.

Today is degree day at York. The tradition (in this university and pretty much everywhere, I’d presume) is that students crowd into the common room downstairs and sip sherry and/or orange juice. And then proceed to go out and play merry hell. For the record, I saw my first ever streaker in York. Unfortunately, it was a male streaker, so “Sweet motherluvin’ jeebus. Stow that away, man!” sprang unbidden into my mind.

<Beavis and Butthead mode> I said sprang. Hur hur hur hur</Beavis and Butthead mode>

Anyway, there happens to be a glut of sherry available in those tiny bite sized cups. The degree day is over, so I’m tempted to start guzzling. I’m not even the only one with these thoughts, mind you.

And to errr.. top it all off, it appears that my presence is required for a pub outing with the South American chap and a few others. Looks like I’m doing the roasting first and the marinade afterwards. And jello shots have finally reached the local pubs. Yay.

This weekend was supposed to have been an eventful one. It lived upto expectations, but for phospor related reasons rather than the expected ones. That’s like - a grand way of saying I vegged out and watched TV the whole weekend. Good innit ? My flat mate of last year graduated and was due back in these parts to collect the piece of paper. This piece of paper cost him (and his parents) money and taught him very little he found useful, but was like .. a symbol. A talisman to his ability to cope in a strange country without knowing much of the language. Or something like that. It was, in his own words, also a great excuse to get drunk.

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