And the Oscar should go to...

I just finished watching "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". It is a brilliant movie and no matter what impresses you in a movie, be it acting (Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet), direction (Michel Gondry of the amazing music videos), screenplay (Charlie Kaufman from Adaptation) there is something there that is bound to impress you. I am scared to a certain extent that my feeble writing skills aren't going to do justice to such an excellent movie, but it definitely deserves an attempt. It is a tight rope that I have to walk here now. I don't want to divulge information that would spoil the movie watching experience for anyone, and I want to write something interesting and possibly convince you that I have some grey matter up there.

The premise of the story is that a company called Lacuna Inc has discovered a procedure that enables a doctor to erase unwanted memories. The easiest way to make an incredible idea believable is to place it in the most familiar looking surroundings possible. So the setting of the movie is very contemporary and if you've lived on the East Coast in the Boston area, you aren't going to have much trouble in picturing yourself as Joel or Clementine.

I am not going to lie about this but there have been times in my life when I wished there were a way to erase unwanted memories. In some sense I think I have managed to erase some people from my mind to as great an extent as possible. I really don't believe in wallowing in misery and sitting there pining for someone. Part of me considers romantic feelings rather mawkish but I do admit it would be rather nice to fall in love again. I've never tried recalling any memories of a happier time because I consider it pointless, but I admit some other people might want to do that. Personally this is the happiest I have been in a long time and I wonder if I really want to ruin this with someone new. ;-)

The storyline though takes this theme of erasing unwanted memories and gives us the writer's opinion about relationships...essentially that "It is better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all". The ending I think is a little off, but I think only an anonymus author can really do justice to the ending. Inherently the writer is bound to become famous and his ex is bound to see the movie, so that does limit what the writer wants to do with the ending. (Of course if I created a piece of art like this, I'd be shouting out to the world, bragging about my creation.) What I take back from the movie is this... Even if you don't have a "Spotless Mind" with no sad memories you can still have "Eternal Sunshine". I don't know why "Eternal Sunshine" wasn't even nominated but if I had a vote for the best movie of the year, this would be it.

To San Diego and back

So I did drive down to San Diego with two of my friends from UW Madison, Devang and Yogesh. The two of them will also be my co-workers, so they will likely be my companions at lunch for the next few years. The drive down I-5 was fairly straightforward. It took us an incredible amount of time to get through LA because of the grid-lock and thankfully the weather wasn't as bad as we had expected. Driving the powerful Chevy Impala rental was fun and the GPS system helped us drive to many places with ease.

San Diego is a very lovely city. It looks a lot like a vacation town with palm trees, beaches, massive streets and quaint Mexican-style architecture. The terrain is slightly hilly which makes for a lot of scenic drives and majestic vistas. I also have a lot of friends who work at Qualcomm and just meeting up with everyone, playing cards until 3 am, bantering each other was cool. We went to Coronado Island and the drive on the long bridge had one of the loveliest views I've seen.

The drive back was fairly uneventful although marked with a lot of rain. Today I checked out Toyotas and Hondas. The Honda Civic was much better than the Toyota Corolla... the new Corolla seems to be very noisy and bumpy and the Honda much less so. The Camry and Accord were quite comparable but I liked the Accord better because it looked a little nicer. I'll be taking the Acura RSX for a spin tomorrow but so far I am inclined on buying a Honda Civic Coupe. Sumeet, I am sorry if I am buying a really regular car but most of the brands you mention dont have showrooms around here. Renault, Cooper, Lotus... Subaru, Mitsubishis have lower resale values so thats out. Audi too expensive. Fords I dont trust enough and low resale, mileage again. So just the normal desi car seems the way to go for now. Will try test driving an Audi but I don't think I cant afford a brand new one.

California Dreaming!

In an amazing twist of fate I am now moving to the Bay Area to work at a cool company that makes graphics cards. It has been a very busy final few days in Madison and I am going to miss this awesome place like crazy, but it is time to move on. Madison has been my home away from home. Anyone who has been to Madison knows that if there is one livable place in the Midwest, it has to be Madison. I could go on singing paens about the lovely capitol, the lakes, the Monona terrace and the pretty university, but maybe I'll do that another time. I am going to miss Nivedita more than anyone else. She has been my best friend and closest confidant for sometime now and I know hard it is to make really good friends.

Santa Clara is the perfect location for an Electrical Engineer like me. The weather is perfect, there are lots of other engineers around, there are plenty of Indians and Indian food places. I already have some friends there... Also I am patching up with my ex, always a plus. My ex-roommate that is ;-)... I haven't liked staying alone that much and Devang is a fun and interesting character. He will drag the geeky Saket to some nice and interesting places. I haven't been this happy in a very long time and if I believe in Zen-ism I wonder how long this will last. Maybe having low expectations helps sometimes... This blog has never been about philosophy and I will keep it that way.

And so I reach San Jose on Friday and then we are heading to San Diego. We are thinking about making a pitt-stop in LA. It is kind of like a "Sideways" (the movie) of our own. Speaking of Sideways... that was an awesome movie. Very funny and somehow sounds autobiographical (not mine, the author's). I am not much of a wine connoisseur... I have had some Chardonay and Zinfandel but I have trouble even distinguishing between simple wines and I am the last person who would know a good wine from a bad... My guess is I have only had cheap bad wines if the one's served on planes and Olive Garden are anything to go by. The great part about the movie are these deep connections/analogies that the characters draw between wine and life. Well so this week I am going to buy a new car and hopefully shortlist apartments for April. I want to buy a nice pretty looking sporty car like an Acura RSX but we'll see if I actually go through with it.

The inexpensive laptop and cellphone

I had spoken to Sumeet and Nachiket about this idea to create a cheap computer costing around 100$, which would be a great educational tool for schools in small villages in India. I was considering having FPGA-based processors with Linux OS and such. The hassles were with the assembly language because Intel is definitely not going to allow me to use theirs. Ofcourse I am making this sound a lot easier than it actually is... There are too many software and hardware issues that I can think of from compilers to board level design and I bet there are a million others I haven't even begun to imagine.

Well all my good ideas have already been thought of in most cases. So when BBC News ran a story about an MIT professor who has come up with the idea to do just that, I wasn't all that surprised.
Read cheap computer story

There are other things about my business model which I cant disclose for security purposes...;-) I had a means to get really cheap labor. Well I could still somehow compete with him if I had the money and time to invest in this project, but Mr Negroponte will have a headstart of many years over me now. By the time I will have some time and money to invest in this venture it is going to be a little late. But let's see how this works out. This was kind of an idea of mine to have a self-reliant India making its own home computers. But ah well...

There is another thing I have been toying with for a while now. One of the perspectives that people have of outsourcing is that it is new-age colonialism. So the British bought cotton from India at reduced prices and then sold the cloth to us at high prices. Similarly companies like Texas Instruments (TI), Intel, AMD buy cheap labor from India but they sell us the cellphones or processors for the same American price. The know-how to design these devices exists in India but there are many other problems with manufacturing them. Also a first time indigenous manufacturer will have low sales volumes because of the lack of name recognition and that makes these devices too expensive for people to consider them viable.

But I am hell-bent on precipitating the Revolt of 1857 in 2005 and so I'd like all engineers in say TI India leave TI and start their own company. They make their own designs and sell them to Nokia at much reduced prices and yet make more money than what TI USA was paying them. So we cut the middleman TI USA. Apparently though I've heard that this month some of the best experts in the Broadband division at TI India have left and started their own company. And it makes me happy.

J M Barrie and Michael Jackson??

The reaction which JM Barrie (played by Johnny Depp) gives in the movie "Finding Neverland", sounds a lot like statements Michael Jackson makes in defence of his interest in young boys, when accused similarly. I suppose one imagines the worst in the case of a person who changed his appearance so drastically and puts veils on his children. "Neverland" today has earned a negative connotation in my mind for certain because of MJ's Neverland Ranch.

The movie Finding Neverland was impressive but not superlative. The problem is that there is only this much you can do with that story. It has been treated as well as it could have I think, but inherently there is a limitation on how interesting anyone can make the original tale. The picturization is great and one does feel transported to the late 19th century. Johnny Depp is fairly believable with his Scottish accent and the Davies' kids who inspired "Peter Pan" are extremeley cute and surprisingly precocious. Radha Mitchell, who plays Barrie's wife, does a fine job too. I wonder if she has any Indian blood or just acquired the name because of indo-phile parents.

I dont know what effect JM Barrie had on the boys... the highly positive picture painted of him in the movie may not be completely accurate. Quoting a biography of J M Barrie, "George, one of the sons, died in World War I, Michael drowned himself with his boy friend in Oxford. Michael's death was a deep blow to Barrie. Peter, who become a publisher, committed suicide in 1960." So the story of the children beyond those days wasn't the happiest. Peter seems to have lived a fairly long life even if he did commit suicide at age 60 say.

Another plane journey...

I have travelled a lot this year and thankfully I have been lucky in that these trips were all marked with great weather, punctual flights and generally a hassle-free flying experience. Hence the horrors such as the ones Sumedha mentioned on her blog were quite hard to imagine. Unfortunately, my journey from Los Angeles to Reno was affected by this phenomenon and I got a first-hand experience of this whole thing.

I was supposed to visit my cousin Manish in Reno after the trip to LA. LAX is so far away from Pasadena with soo many grid-locked freeeways, that first I thought I wasnt going to make it in time. I am generally quite paranoid about things and suffice to say I completed all my check-in formalities and still had another hour to spare before boarding. The flight felt normal as usual, I dozed off and was woken up by the sight of cities in Nevada all shrouded in fog. It was a very unusual scenery to say the least. The towns all had a layer of clouds over them and the light slowly diffused out from below. Also all around you could see snow-capped mountains and rolling valleys. But we seemed to be circling the same place and after a while the captain announced that the visibility was very low in Reno and that we were going to have to wait for it to improve. So we kept circling Reno until we ran out of fuel and then we were taken to sin city Las Vegas!

Well I had always wanted to go to Vegas and this seemed like a great opportunity. Southwest ofcourse wasn't paying for my stay in Vegas but I decided to stay all the same instead of going back to LA. So after a lot of help from Manish, I walked to the strip. Spent a good 4 hours there, took lots of pictures... MGM Grand, Bellagio, New York New York, Paris and many more. It was a very interesting experience and someday I am going to go with a lot of time to spend too. The Bellagio fountains I saw on my way once from across the street and then I waited later for almsot an hour and the fountains just wouldnt sing. No one around seemed to know when they play... Finally after an hour long wait and making a lot of Japanese friends I discovered that they stop showing them at midnite. So I just made a quick trip to the Bellagio, saw some of the decorations for the Chinese New Year and played 4 dollars on a slot machine. Ofcourse I didn't win anything and I took a cab back to the hotel and plonked off.

4 hours later I was at the airport again, with a sea of humanity around me. Flights on the east coast had been cancelled because of heavy snow. But as fate would have it, my morning flight to Reno was cancelled too and I was now stranded on the airport until a spot became available on another flight. Essentially I was supposed to stay on the airport until they could find space for 40 people who checked in before me. So I cancelled plans to visit Reno and luckily got a flight which left for Chicago 15 mins later. And by the evening I was back in Madison!