I played around with qik for about a week. Then last weekend I put it to good use:

Update:Somehow this last video wasn’t uploaded the day I took it. Instead it showed up on qik 2 days ago.

This is what your car will look like after you’ve driven for 3 hours in a snow storm.
But if you’re like me, you probably enjoyed most of the drive!

I was very busy with packing for a trip last night, and couldn’t do my nightly update. I gave it some more thought and came to the conclusion that in all likelihood I couldn’t keep it up anyway. So, I’m going to stop calling them “night cap”s and just put a random post on whenever I get a chance - I guess this is no different than before!

After buying an espresso machine recently, I thought I was all set for my caffeine fix. But I realized today that the other half of the equation is the grind otherwise you just can’t make good espresso. I got some stuff from a cafe nearby and the difference from the stuff I bought last week is like night and day!

Following my problems with the battery, I bought a new battery and went about installing it. Here are the simple steps (that took me about 45 minutes to complete):

1. disconnect the current battery
2. unmount the current battery
3. mount the new battery
4. connect the new one

And now: Car 1 - Khosrow 1

update: here are some links where other people have chronicled similar battery problems they were having.

Gallery: Replacing Car Battey

This morning I woke up to the same story as the past few days. Dead car battery, and the cold. And I followed my routine of hooking up the autostarter and giving the car some juice.

Well, it turns out that the problem is just lousy batteries that the manufacturer put in the cars. People are having problems with them at around the same mileage that I have! Anyway, that’s how the day started.

Rest of the day went on as normal (read: boring)

Final act of the day:

note: This was supposed to be posted yesterday, but I forgot to do so.

A guy sits down with a girl, takes out a cigarette and starts trying to light it. He has some extreme difficulty getting it lit, and has obviously never smoked before.

Girl (laughing): Hey, do you want some help with that?
Guy: No, no, I’ve got to practice smoking. Let me do it.
Girl: Seriously? You’re practicing how to smoke?
Guy: Yeah! It’s on my list of things to do. See? (takes out agenda) “Laundry, conference sign-up, smoke.”
Girl looks stunned.
Guy: I don’t want to look like an idiot when I go to Amsterdam!

[via Overheard At McGill]

The other day I was driving back from a weekend trip. I decided to take a less traveled road, a highway that is only 2 lanes and goes through many small towns. About an hour (or maybe less) into the drive, I felt guilty. In an age when everyone is saying the evils of driving gasoline-powered cars, and the concern for the environment is at an all time high I was actually enjoying the drive! There was no one but me on the road, and I was taking in the beautiful scenery as well as the twists on the road. I felt like I understood the purpose of driving wasn’t to get from

At the end of the trip I took about 20 minutes longer to reach my destination and to ease my conscience, the total distance traveled was less than if had taken the main highways!

A while ago, we had a discussion over dinner about the merits of higher education. I was trying my best to argue against non-functional and non-essential education: getting a Masters degree just for the sake of getting one, and so on. From the length of the conversation, it appears I wasn’t very successful at convincing everyone else about my position. A couple of nights ago I came across this passage

When a society is rich, its people don’t need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they’ve got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries…[1]

1. The Unbearable Lightness of Being

So my laptop died this past Friday, and I have been slowly realizing how useful virtualization or cloud computing would be RIGHT NOW! I am by no means cut off from computers. I have access to a couple of them here at home, and all day at work I stare at various computers. And on top of all that, the laptop that I lost (oh, cruel fate!) didn’t even have many personal files on it. It was a work laptop, but I had gotten so used to having access that I’m in a mini-withdrawal right now.

I think most of all I miss the customization I had done on there, which made my day-to-day tasks easy. I’m beginning to think that if I had that level of customization on a cloud computer, I would never run this risk again. Something like igoogle or the upcoming Live Mesh.