Personal Reflections – Page 25

“What’s Wikipedia?”

Do you ever get that feeling when you’re walking to someplace or working on something, when you’re hit by a sudden feeling of nausea? It happened to me yesterday when I was at the Tesco supermarket. I suddenly felt listless and quite nauseated. Maybe it was due to the fact that I was wheeling my shopping cart round and round in circles. I have no idea why I was doing that. Maybe it was because I hadn’t had any breakfast. Anyway, I felt that I was this close to puking. I quickly checked out with whatever I had picked up so far.

As soon as I stepped out, a massive blast of fresh air hit me and I felt so much better instantly. That’s when I ‘saw’ for the first time how green this town is. Whether it’s on campus or other parts in town, you’ll find large lush green fields, or at the very least many trees dotting every road. I did notice this fact when I came here, but for the first time the greenery all around me struck me as I stood there drinking it all in.

Delhi is a concrete jungle. Even the few trees you have left will be covered with soot from the thousands of vehicles driving past them. I was quite fortunate in that the place where my home is does have more than average green cover.

I miss being in a hectic city where people are always zipping from one place to another, cocooned in the comfort of your vehicle, the Metro, or even the humble autorickshaw. It’s a big change coming to place where practically everything is, at max, half an hour walk away. For one, it’s given me a perspective of how incredibly huge New Delhi is – and given its size, how it does a reasonably good job of handling transportation and civic infrastructure.

I find it difficult to put into words what I was about to say now, but the gist is that that moment outside showed me how wonderful the enviroment of this place is. Given the number of things I’m involved in, I’m often rushing from one meeting to another; rushing from one deadline to another; rushing from location to another as I try to fit in multiple layers of work sandwiched in day.

I won’t lie – I am stressed by this hectic schedule, and I love this stress. I’ve realized this fact about myself that I have often suspected – I enjoy working under pressure. I hate not having to work on something with the clock ticking down.

But I also realized that within this schedule I can and should take some time to slow down. Go for a long walk. Watch squirrels fighting with each other near the lake. Drink in the freshness.

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Twitter flyer — Promotional flyers for my Twitter demo

I work part-time at SCEPTrE (not to be confused with the James Bond Evil Inc ‘SPECTRE’), which – to cut a long story short – gets fuckloads of money from the university and external government funding agencies, and puts it to use by paying their employees (even part-time ones) quite well and conducting events to improve ‘personal development’ of Surrey students.

We conducted an event last Thursday, where businesses from various industry verticals came along to learn about social media technologies. We had people from PR companies to give them a lecture first, and then they were given a demo of various social media sites by us. My task was to demo Twitter. At the same time, it was an opportunity for Surrey students to network with businesses.

I was prepared for the fact that a majority of the attendees would not know what Twitter is, even if they had heard of it in mainstream media. I walked in to the event confident I’d be able to field most questions they asked.

What I wasn’t prepared for is the following. Someone saw a flyer mentioning ‘wikis’. So she came up to me to ask:

What are ‘wikis’?

A fair question, you would say. Might not have heard of wikis in general, but would surely have heard of Wikipedia? So I mentioned how it’s “just like Wikipedia”. Pat came the response:

What’s Wikipedia?

I leave that as a parting question. How would you explain Wikipedia to someone who’d never heard of it? I fielded that one, following it up with a prolonged session of headdesking when she was gone.

NSFW: Cherchez la fame – or why the media’s obsession with Twitter campaigns will make customer service smell French (techcrunch.com)
Sainsbury’s self-checkouts fail on so many level (thatcanadiangirl.co.uk)
Will New Delhi ‘Attitude Makeover’ Work for India Games? (time.com)

“My phone got stolen and I lost all my numbers”

You want an anecdote to demonstrate how polite the British can be? Here’s one.

You know those times when you receive a text message from someone whose number you haven’t yet stored as a contact? I’m sure we’ve all had moments like that. Back in India if something like this happens you’d probably send back a message saying “Who’s this?”, appending an ‘lol’ perhaps if the text was funny. Or maybe even “Who the fuck are you?”, in case you want to practise your French.

If the same thing happens here in UK though, this is the standard response people send back:

I’m sorry, but I lost my phone [alternatively, ‘my phone got stolen’] and I lost all my numbers. May I know who this is?

I kid you not, but this has happened with me at least 5-6 times so far – especially when I’m exchanging numbers with someone for the first time and the other person forgets to save my name as a contact. Then, when I get back to them via text (and if they’d forgotten to store my details), every time I got back a text which says pretty much precisely what I wrote above.

I can imagine British people having secret meetings in hidden lairs across the nation to decide protocols on issues such as this. “Yorrite lads, we need to come up with a jolly good protocol to maintain our stiff upper lip if we make a social faux pas in forgetting someone’s cellphone number.” I wonder whether cellphones sold in Britain have a ‘panic button’ which these genteel folk can rely on to send the nationally approved text response to awkward social situations.

It’s either that, or the poor British folk have rotten luck in actually getting constantly mugged and having their phones stolen.

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Last Wednesday we had Headphone Disco at our students’ union nightclub. Basically, no sound is pumped through external speakers; instead, everyone gets their personal set of wireless headphones and can switch between a grand total of three different music choices – ‘DJ station A’, ‘DJ station B’, and ‘off’. (The two DJ stations being DJs on stage playing different music.)

[yahoo 18206075]

Watch a clip from Headphone Disco at University of Surrey’s Rubix

As you can see in the short video above, it can be quite a weird experience. Bunch of folks seemingly dancing to…nothing at all. You can be on the dancefloor jigging along to some song when all of a sudden you realize all of your friends around you are on the other station and dancing along to something completely different.

The system does have its drawbacks. For instance, there was this one instance when both DJs started playing…started played…songs by Miley Fucking Virus.

Somewhere on this planet, Miley 'SnakeMonster' Virus is celebrating this coup

The ‘off’ station came handy at such times. The other problem was that wearing a decent set of headphones meant that a lot of people laboured under the delusion that they were good singers. The cacophony of ‘sing-alongs’ that I could hear even over my headphones was so terrible that it must be outlawed under international human rights standards.

When I first heard of Headphone Disco, I was curious to know how they handled clubbers breaking the supplied headphones. Did they have tracking systems installed, and dispatch a SWAT team to bust you in case you broke one?

Turns out they just take a £5 deposit before handing out the headphones.

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While I’m at it, I might as well give an update on what’s happening in my life.

After a long Christmas break of basically watching my toenails grow, university life has been extremely hectic ever since the new semester started. I think I need to make a copy-paste template saying “I’m busy with work for The Stag and MAD TV and CoLab/SCEPTrE and gooble gobble gooble gobble“. Because I am, and also with all the labs and lectures which make for a much heavier study schedule. I usually get a handful of hours of sleep daily; after that, it’s back to keeping track of all the different things I’m doing and trying to make sense of what to do when.

BTW, I’m also blogging about my experience for The IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology). IET is UK’s professional body of engineers; in a sense, somewhat like IEEE in USA but covering more engineering disciplines. (Trivia – University of Surrey’s Vice Chancellor, Professor Christopher Snowden, is the current president of IET.)

IET student blogs launched — I swear I think they've Photoshopped my neck to make it appear longer

So anyway, these ‘student diaries’ have been up for quite a while, and I intended to mention them here but totally forgot. Until today, when they pushed this out as the lead story in their student newsletter. On the other hand, I’m surprised that I got all that Hitchhiker’s stuff approved in my submissions to the IET so far. 😀

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