Parsed Participle

After YAPC::Asia, I still have a few days left before I start work on June 2^nd. On Saturday (May 24^th)Yurika and me left for Sapporo after deciding to buy plane tickets on the spur of the moment.

For a late lunch on Saturday, we walked to Burger Mania:

Burger Mania provides authentic hamburgers while providing a diverse cafe experience that brings people together.

Despite having decided not to go to Hokkaido earlier that morning, we remained indecisive till late afternoon, before finally giving in. We bought Air Do tickets at 5:45 PM for a 7:15 PM flight; packed and left home by 6:15; Got to Haneda by 6:50, making it just in time.

So my sabbatical ends in the same place it began. Sapporo has great weather this time of the year, and there was more cat-sitting as I got a chance to improve my radio-controlled chopper skills.

I decided that this was a great time to overhaul my Zaurus, since I've been meaning to upgrade the OS to Ångström for a while now. I unearthed some interesting code that I probably wrote on a plane ride a while ago, but that I shall save for another post.

I also discovered a great Soup Curry restaurant. I notice that Wikipedia does not have an English entry for Soup-Curry yet. Must I start one?

YAPC::Asia ( Yet Another Perl Conference, Asia) took place in Tokyo (where it has always been held since 2006) from May 14^th through 16^th.

I had missed the last conferences (in 2007, I was in Hiroshima working on yet another impossible-deadline project, which was memorable because it involved adventures in Javascript; in 2006, tickets were sold out too early), so this time I took no chances and bought my tickets well in advance (before my sabbatical even started).

I even submitted a few talk proposals, out of which a talk about multiprocessing/concurrency (entitled: "From POE To Erlang") was accepted for the 'advanced' track: There were three halls/tracks in all, and the scheduling and organization was really excellent: My talk on POE (The Perl Object Environment) was followed by a talk on XIRCD, which involved some POE code so that there seemed to be some continuity.

This was also the first time in some 5 years since I actually spoke to a live audience (if you exclude the odd presentation I sometimes make at work, in broken Japanese), since I live and work in Japan. The talk went OK, but suffered a hurried, insufficient preparation. Making slides isn't as easy as I remember. I was out of practice. A second talk was also accepted, not for the actual conference tracks, but for the arrival party, on the 14^th. Surprisingly enough, a Javascript talk; turns out that YAPC::Asia and the Perl community in general is very Javascript friendly. This Talk ('The Little Javascripter / Higher-Order Javascript') did not go too well at all; I ran out of time half-way through my slides (which I feared were not really complete). It turned out to be an expensive trial run, but a good learning experience.

But I hope the main talk made up for it. Special thanks to Ishigaki-san for the translations. POE really has been amazingly useful to me in the last few months, and I thought that talking about it would be a nice way to introduce Erlang to the Camel-folks. A lot were already in the know though; one lightning talk was on exactly the same topic (a POE and Erlang success story in Amazon), and while some people made strange faces at the Prologesque syntax, a couple of Erlang fans were nodding excitedly.

The Camel Folks

The great thing about YAPC is that you get to meet so many people. They say that this was the biggest YAPC yet. Meeting Larry Wall early on the morning of the arrival party day was especially memorable: I had no idea he would be showing up for the Tsukiji 7AM-sushi eating expedition, so imagine my surprise when he appeared out of nowhere and greeted me saying "Hajimemashite! Larry desu. Yoroshiku!" (I was probably the only person there that morning who he'd not met before). He's as funny as I imagined: When we arrived to find all the sushi restaurants closed, he expressed some mild dismay that his pun on the expression "shimatta!" had gone unnoticed. ('Shimatta' is Japanese for 'closed', as well as an expression for 'darn it!')

Me and Thilo got to meet him and Gloria Wall again, when we bumped into them at lunch time in Matsuya's.

Jesse was exactly like I imagined; bubbly and resourceful; Leon Brocard was surprised (pleasantly bewildered?) to learn that I use Devel::ebug, his replacement for the original Perl debugger. I took the opportunity to bounce off a couple of ideas I had (and a hack that I'd made and had been using) on it. Jonathon Rockway's lightning talk on here documents were pretty useful, and Ingy's talks were the most fun. pQuery is a great idea.

The speakers were invited to Dan Kogai's (the Encode.pm guy!) house (now reknown for it's fabulous view) for a weekend Hackathon; I couldn't make it but did show up for a few hours on Sunday evening. I did not have anything planned to work on, so I started messing with Devel::ebug and (after the heads-up from Jesse's talk) Carp::REPL as well. I was hoping to re-implement my multiplexer hack (A way to allow Perl debugee processes to connect to a debug server so that ebug clients can debug them) without POE (which ought not to be a dependency for something like a debugger, though it was tremendously useful in prototyping the idea). Not much progress, but great fun. These people are nice.

At a time when I'm understandably confused about the notion of feeling or not feeling at home in different places, this is welcome indeed: I'm experiencing this joy of being 'back home' - to my tiny apartment in Tokyo.

I got back to Japan on the 3^rd of May, and walked around Ueno station smiling to myself like a fool. It was a great trip, I've met a lot of people, put in a lot of quality time, even visited Chennai after over two whole years - but I'm feeling great just being back in Tokyo.

I get back to work from June, so that means that this is probably the only stretch of time I have (or might ever have) in Tokyo that I do not have to 'work'.

That said, there are plenty of things that must be done; It seems that Leg-4 is not going to be a vacation at all. But for right now, hmmm... Kaki-fry sure sounds good...

After an eventful return to Tokyo, and a night spent sleeplessly tidying up my apartment, I took a flight the next morning (April 22^nd) to Chennai, via Bangkok.

I reached Chennai late on the same night. I had tried to convince my parents otherwise, but they remained keen on picking up both me and my sister (whose flight was coming in at around 5AM, only a few hours later).

Chennai has changed. Roads have widened, only to be left as congested as before, or perhaps worse: so many more people seem to be buying cars. The most significant change - and a very recent one - is that Chennai is no longer The City Of Hoardings: All signboards and roadside hoardings have gone, and the absence of the largest of them feels strange. All of a sudden, the city looks unusually green: Buildings that had been hidden for decades are now exposed; continuous stretches of greenery have been freed into full view. Chennai is one of the greenest cities, and without all these trees, it would have choked up and died years ago.

My goals for this trip are:

1. To pick up academic transcripts from both the Universities I graduated from while I was in Chennai: (a) University of Madras ('96-'99), Bachelor Of Electronic Science, (b) Pondicherry University ('01-'02), Post Graduate Diploma in Computer Applications
2. Meet with an ex-professor from (b)
3. Other than my folks and my estranged sister, spend time with, or at least meet:
   • Praveen Dass
   • Arvind Balan, who complains of London
   • Prasanna, who has now been through multiple baptisms of fire in a start-up
4. Sort out some personal finance issues, including an ugly mess that ICICI bank and BSNL seemed to have created (the same thing mentioned in this complaint happened with my old, dormant account itself; and while I cannot say that it cost me 'mental stress', it was a lot of trouble indeed.)

My folks were so determined to make the most of their time with me that they actually came with me as I ran around both University campuses trying to coax disgruntled government employees to process my request for the transcripts!
I must admit that it turned out to be a good idea; we sort of multi-tasked and got stuff done. I was especially lucky that my street-smart and wily sister (whose 'Chennai skills' have not eroded much despite so much time spent in far-away Chile) helped.

So Leg-3 is done; and only objective (2) has not been satisfied. Oh well.

An Unexpected visit to Nagoya. (!!)

My flight from LaGuardia to Detroit (NW 1195) was delayed due to bad weather. It was my connecting flight back to Japan, so I ended up missing my flight from Detroit to Tokyo(NW11 or perhaps NW25 - there was some confusion). At Detroit, the Northwest folks got me to an alternate flight, to Nagoya instead of Narita (Tokyo), and the plane was just about to begin rolling along when they opened the door and let me in . I was running all the way, so I didn't even get to ask what sort of options they would be providing, if at all, once I reached Nagoya.

I was supposed to get to Tokyo on the 21st evening, catch a night's sleep in my apartment, and then fly again the very next morning, beginning Sabbatical Leg 3 (Chennai, India). Had they not put me onto the Nagoya-bound flight (NW71), I'd have missed my flight to India for sure. But here I am now, in a train bound for the JR Nagoya station, with a reimbursement-promised Shinkansen (Bullet-train) printed schedule in my hand. They were waiting for me soon as I arrived at Nagoya and informed me that Northwest would pay for my Shinkansen ride back to Tokyo.

So, instead to arriving at Narita and taking a train to Tokyo, I ended up arriving at Nagoya and taking a (slightly faster) train to Tokyo!

Anyway, they were really sweet and efficient about the whole thing. I'm glad to be home.

The second leg of my sabbatical is just about done.

I'm at LaGuardia Airport, lamenting the lack of wireless Internet access, as I wait for my flight to board. I'd hoped to write about my days in New York as they rolled by, but I'll have to settle for a last-minute account. This trip has served its purpose as a holiday, and I managed to spend a good deal of time walking around Manhattan, meeting cousins, friends, and a lot of surprisingly friendly people. At least twice, complete strangers offered me a ride in the city when I was actually looking out for a cab; and everybody I asked for directions were extremely helpful. Needless to say, a great part of the trip was spent in long, desultory walks. The sublet culture is awesome; I'd say it's easily the best way to stay in Manhattan if you are there for over a week.

Yurika and me took a bus ride to Washington DC where we spent a couple of days with a friend of hers. DC is a nice city to walk around in, and I walked great distances both by myself, and with Yurika and Omura-san.

There are two restaurants that we recall best as part of the eating experience in DC - a seafood place called Legal Sea Foods and a concept Pizza restaurant called Matchbox, which seemed to be almost always full with huge crowds waiting outside throughout the day. We got to visit the Smithsonian museum at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center (the other half of the National Air and Space Museum) when we went to see off Omura-san at Dulles Airport. The NASM was not as much fun as might have been had I actually visited when I was a child.

Back in Manhattan, I was lucky enough to attend a colloquium at the Courant Institute (Where the NYU Computer Science department is located), which featured a project that makes the night sky search-able. It implements a search engine for astronomical images that uses geometric hashes (as opposed to words) derived from the pixels of the patterns that stars form in random images. Got a taste of what a CS lecture might feel like (and there was breakfast as well).

Funk: The Headhunters (sans Hancock, whose absence was noted in many ways) were playing at the Iridium on Broadway. I dragged (my cousins) Aamer and Zafar to see the second set. Earlier on the same day, Aamer had taken me on a guided walk around the West Village all the way up to the Meat-Packing District;

His brother Zubair on the other hand, showed me the Lower East, and his symbolically located apartment which stands on the eastward-pushing demographic border of the lower east.

...

As a going-away gift from my colleagues (who feared that my sabbatical could turn out to be permanent), I got this rather wonderful toy: A radio-controlled, unbreakable 2-channel indoor helicopter. It has only collective and yaw (anti-torque), but is still capable of surprisingly controllable flight.

I'm nearing the end of the first leg of my sabbatical, which began on March 13th. I spent this entire period in Sapporo, Hokkaido, spending my time taking long, contemplative walks, trying to figure out what I'd like to do when all the unwinding is done. I also cooked a great deal, mostly grilled fish and miso soup. For amusement, I carried with me both my guitar and my new processor, a lot of 'math refresher' books, and a tiny, radio-controlled indoor helicopter to amuse the cats that I was pet-sitting.

I will be back in Tokyo tomorrow, only to leave to NY for the second leg of my sabbatical; then back again to Tokyo for a mere day, only to leave immediately (on the 21st of April) to Chennai, India - where I will be meeting my 'estranged' sister, who has been lost now for some time, in various South American countries.

Of course, before I resume work again, there will still be a sabbatical stretch (leg 4) in Tokyo, from May 4th until the end of the month.

I had hoped I could squeeze Nagoya into all this (FLOPS 2008 is from April 14th to 16th), but that would certainly have been biting off more than I could chew.

I've never been a fan of guitar processors. One good reason for that has been, of course, that I never actually play (any of the guitars lying dormant in my possession that I may have bought on a whim or 'borrowed'). Another reason could be that I was spoiled early on by such wonderful things as a Fender Bassman (which, as I recall was fed by an nameless antique PA valve amplifier). In fact, back at home (and I am referring to Chennai) the last amp that used to clutter my room was a similarly salvaged valve driven PA, and I'd never moved the knobs on it after I'd figured out the sweet spot: very bright, warm and ringy sound from a Strat-ish single-coil guitar that also used to clutter up my room.

The only stomp-boxes I ever liked were the Boss OD-1 and (though I never owned one) the Tube-Screamer.

Of course, I am referring to overdrive here; all the other stuff - delays and chorus effects were another matter, but even then I rather liked the stomp-boxes compared to those nasty early guitar processors with their knob-less menu-and-mode-driven digital interfaces and displays.

This is why though I'd been in Japan for long enough (and this is where you can get almost any processor in existence. If you are a guitar enthusiast and have not discovered Ochanomizu yet, you should), I'd never sunk the cash for a processor.

However, a few days ago, for no apparent reason I found myself window-shopping at this guitar store in Shibuya, and even more surprising, a little later I found myself buying a guitar processor. I had never even asked to plug it in and see how it sounds. (Then as if to add one more tiny notch to the unexpectedness of the whole thing, I cycled home with the large box precariously half-stuffed into a bursting backpack)

It was the styling, the knobs, the 707-cockpit-like appeal of a very analog looking, metallic, clunky yet intuitive interface: meet the BOSS ME-50 Multiple Guitar Effects processor. Essentially a stomp-box pedal-board, only that it's all in one single unit, and no fussing with inter-pedal connecting cables and unwieldy power supplies. Construction is extremely rugged and the expression pedal feels great. The idea behind the interface (all knobs) is that you have a familiar, all-at-a-glance view of the settings on all the effects as you fiddle around for the sound you want. I imagine this is amazingly easier than any button-ridden processor, where each interface needs to be 'learned'.

Of course, the amp-modelling sucks (I'm sure it is fantastic and all that, it's just that amp modelling never appealed to me), but in a while I found great overdrive tones (the overdrive panel has an OD-1 mode) that suit me just fine. Oh, and delay is awesome: just like having a Boss Digital Delay built into a chunk of the unit; after just a few minutes of fiddling, I even figured out how to do the 'Slang' stunts (i.e., Jaco Pastorius' improvisations over a delay-looped 'rhythm track', as performed live in the track called 'Slang'). This is of course, meant to be a 'live' processor - that you plug into traditional amps, where most of the overdrive actually happens. Consequently, the amp-modelling is not the focus (which suits me fine). In the meantime, it sounds great through open-air headphones!

I swear that's what it says! Have a look!