04 Feb 2024
It is weird how risk averse I am. If I am in a set of conditions that I don’t like, then those conditions didn’t arise overnight. They are a result of choices that I have made over decades. I could have chosen other things.
I hope it is not too late for an alternative life. It first occurred to me, when I realized that I had no plan for the future. Where do I want to be 5 years from today? I have no clue.
I get only one life. And I have squandered half of it. And it is such a waste. I mean there is a pervasive doomerism to it too. There is the nihilistic view - were I to be as successful as my friends, would life still not feel meaningless? What do I do? How do I turn back the clock.
The fact of the matter is when making a choice we don’t consider all available alternatives. We just look at the most popular two or three choices.
For an example, there are all kinds of careers and businesses, were you to decide on a career or to start a business - what would you do? Of course things will depend on your background and your experience but there are only a few things that you can think of. The market is vast but choice is constrained by knowledge.
This is weird to me, but I want a change from my job and I can only think of Engineering or MBA. Or maybe a content creator? If I were to make an app, it would be a productivity app. Is there all there is to the world. There is so much opportunity in the world, but we only know the most walked paths. Every seems to trod the well trodden paths.
There is more to life, there has to be more to life, but how do I get to it?
One thing is clear to me, I don’t know where I will be 5 years from now, but One thing is for sure, I will certainly not be productive.
As a child I wanted to be some sort of a mad scientist. But that dream met reality in Grad School and fizzled out. I don’t have any other ideas about life. I want to think and discuss cool ideas, but I don’t know how.
One thing that has stuck me is how isolated I have been in my life. I have no one to bounce ideas off of, except for my closest family which for the most part means my wife, mom, to some extent my father and perhaps my brother occassionally. That is all.
Today I am employed and I am not thankful for it. It feels like a chore. It feels like I deserved better. I could have been worse off too. At least I am gainfully employed. I am married. But I feel burntout by life. Days at office are difficult and stressful. The work is not difficult. I just don’t want to do it. I just while away time. I don’t know what to do, how to go about it. I just pass days.
This cannot last. I know. I should do something. I have to change. But I am burntout to my very soul. I don’t feel like doing anything. Everything feels difficult. All I want to do is watch YouTube and feel productive.
There has to be more to life. One has to do more. But I just dread going to work. I hate going to office. I don’t like it at all. There is so much work, that I don’t know how to do. I just postpone things and do them at the last moment. I am not doing anything. I am just passing time. If I just did all my tasks on time, everything would be so much better.
04 Feb 2023
It has been a long time since I blogged and there have been many reasons and most important one being that I was sort of lost, I am not saying that I am no longer lost, but I am in a much better way than what I was a few years ago.
I have been gainfully employed throughout this period, but the world has changed. And I have changed. I have always been waiting for when I do the things that I want to do. And mostly I want to learn cool things and do nerdy stuff. I think I had the realization that it won’t be ever the case that you get a clean break and restart from the beginning. You have to do the best in whatever time that you have got.
So with that in mind, I have decided to take control of things. I am working as a branch manager and there are certainly upsides of this job, the most important one being a certain amount of leeway that I have available and I thank god for that. However, that is not all.
Ever since I was a child I have dreamt of glory and that glory has always meant winning awards and doing scientific things that wow the world. I know, showoff. However, I have never acted on things. I can’t let my dreams be dreams forever.
31 Jul 2020
Just a brief post to thank God for everything.
:)
27 Jul 2020
hevil.me
This is me now, I guess. Its just a name I chose, its not like its very meaningful, but is hopefully memorable.
Status Update
An update as to the current situation is in order.
The last post on this blog is from Dec 2017. So much shit has happened since then!
What have I been working on? Everything and nothing. I have been exploring my academic interests. I have noticed that these days, I don’t really have any “trivial” hobbies, not that I am trying to belittle them or show off or anything like that, its just an observation. I don’t feel comfortable reading fiction any more.
Case in point, I found out about hopepunk and as is the case with me, bought the Red Mars triology on Kindle without so much as a second thought (definitely not a third thought for sure), and it was for me unpalatable. I just couldn’t read through it. Its not because the story was bad or anything, but the very idea of reading through or sitting through a story just seems to me to be so tasteless.
I can’t for the life of me watch game videos or serials or movies. All I watch on youtube are generally Conference videos on programming or bread tube content.
But anyways, what have I been working on? Its like I have been playing Elder Scrolls in my real life. In that game your skills increase the more you use them. So if you run all the time, you get better at running. If you fight with swords, you get better at fighting with swords. The idea of games like these is that they expect you to have a playstyle, but it doesn’t penalize you if you don’t stick to it. Sure if you started playing as a person who is a magic user and suddenly switch to a two handed sword and heavy armor, you’ll have a hard time initially, but if you play your cards right (and I am mostly talking about ESIV Oblivion), you can end up at a high level in all the skills.
You have ranks in skills in Elder Scrolls, you start as a Novice, then you become an Apprentice, then you become a Journeyman, then Expert and then finally Master. Of course, you are expected to only have a few Master Skills. But the way I play this game of life, the way I have invested time in things, I feel like I am now starting to become a Journeyman in a lot of skills. Ideally I’d have been an Expert at CFD, Fluid Mechanics and Engineering and a Journeyman at Programming but the way I have pursued my interests is - I have just spent all my time in training.
Goals
Goals are always good to have. I am getting married. And I hadn’t yet put that down in writing. I mean for me, not writing things has become the norm now. I remember the old times, when I would literally wake up from sleep just to record a couple of lines that I felt were very well written or whatever as soon as they occurred to me in my dreams and thoughts. I carried a notebook everywhere I went and wrote in it at all times in IIT Kanpur.
Now I don’t write, this doesn’t mean that I don’t have thoughts anymore, I still do. Its just, the whole “record before I forget it” complex has disappeared and been replaced by this safe and secure notion of “It will come to me when I need it, and if it doesn’t come then I didn’t really need it in the first place”.
I have never really been very goal oriented. I mean it would have been nice if I was, but I have always taken the scenic route and I don’t see the point in hurrying. Sure it helps, it might’ve gotten me an engineering job, it might have taken me to US do my PhD or it might have resulted in the completion of my PhD from IIT Patna.
But even if those things didn’t happen, am I any less happy? Would I rather one of those things than this blessed life I have right now, where I get to be in home quarantine for a week then my brother comes home and then I get married. Like wth, why are so many good things happening to me?
Goal setting
I’ve tried so many time to set goals, but I have never stuck to it. I have tried a plethora of methods to record tasks and do them etc. But in my opinion its best to just write in a notebook.
I have this notion of ok, tomorrow (or this weekend) I will really sit down and I will draw a real plan of action and really follow through with it and develop this plan of action on all the things that I want to do and then I will plan the exact weeks I want to do them in and then I will actually do them.
Spoiler alert: I am yet to write this amazing document.
Taking Stock
I generally just take an informal stock. Where I am at in my head? And it helps, it helps in calming you down. And the best thing I can tell you is that if you don’t know what to do with yourself, just start writing. Maintain a writing habit. I have been writing on and off since at least freshman year of high school, and a lot of that survives, so I can read from it. It serves as a personal record and a store of memories. You might feel like what if someone reads it? I understand the apprehension. But trust me, when you have 20 notebooks full of thoughts, nobody in their right mind is ever going to touch them.
Taking stock is essential. And I ask myself, have I improved? What has changed since 2017?
What has changed
I am more me now. More authentic, more sure of my convictions. Some of the old is there too still. I still get stuck at times. I still don’t really listen to others as much. I try more though. I try with more conviction. I stick to things longer now. I don’t quit as easily anymore.
I am less afraid. I am more accepting. I am way beyond being becoming.
03 Dec 2017
Today, after a long period of time of mulling things over, I have decided to work on CFD again. I have some experience in CFD as I did a couple of courses, as also my MTech and PhD involved various levels of work belonging to the domain of CFD.
However, in all this time, I have never paid any real attention to what I was learning and the core of CFD was very much a black box to me, especially in my PhD when I literally just fiddled with the dials in Fluent without even trying for the least bit of illumination.
My passion for CFD died a quiet death in the period that my PhD become moribund. I remember starting with OpenFOAM, and running headlong into wall that crushed me and all my aspirations of getting CFD to work or learning it for fame and glory. Meanwhile I saw my friends, who stuck with it gain more and more experience as also comfort in it.
When I became ill, I realized that CFD was beyond me, that even if I gave my whole life I would never be able to learn it. I still think much the same - but I want to not quit before giving it a try. I am not really sure why I am starting with CFD now, what with all the water that has flown down the Ganges. What is my angle here? I have vague ideas of making it into a hobby or maybe eventually getting a job in some respectable company. I don’t know how much will bear fruit and how much would be an utter and abject failure. Without much embellishment, here is some stuff that I wanted to talk about.
CFD stands for as you may no doubt know, Computational Fluid Mechanics. It is, I have felt mathematically and computationally involved. It takes a lot of mathematical acumen and technical mastery to have a good command over this field. This is one of the reasons why, no doubt what I say, I have found it difficult to understand. Today I was pouring over the text by Versteeg in a last ditch attempt to understand some of the stuff that makes up CFD. I then found a half written code by me from my PhD days where I was attempting to solve the one dimensional heat diffusion problem. I have figured out most of it and will have a solution in some time.
CFD was really invented only in the 60s. It has evolved tremendously as a field in this period. Computational power is cheap and easily available. Computational languages are optimized and much faster. The golden era of CFD has truly arrived. CFD is not the same as it was in the 60s. So many new methods are available. I would go over them in decent time, when I get a chance. However some things haven’t changed and will not change in the near future.
CFD is really about discretizing the domain of the problem, and then writing the equations for every point in the domain and finally obtaining a set of equations that need to be solved. The equations are solved in one of the many possible ways. From something like TDMA to Gaussian methods or iterative methods or whatever. However what I realized was that you are only building the coefficient matrix and then we get a linear system like:
\[Ax = b\]
which is then solved to obtain \(x\), which is the vector of the velocities. This can now be processed to obtain the velocity field or indeed any other field that is desired. That is all there is to CFD. I think with this knowledge it might be just a tiny bit easier to solve CFD problems at home or at work(whenever I get to work on CFD).
I also have to learn OpenFOAM, and that is something that I have decided, no matter what I will learn OpenFOAM, which in turn requires me to learn C++, Tensor Calculus, Batchelor and Schlichting level Fluid Mechanics, Vector Calculus, Partial Differential Equations, Linear Algebra and so on. So I have my work cut out for me. Lets see how much we do manage to achieve. Wish me luck.That is all, or is it?
05 Nov 2017
For sometime now I have been chasing the idea of becoming a machine learning expert. In pursuing this goal, the most that I have managed to do is that I have managed to read the introduction and first chapter of the Calculus book by Apostol. I did solve some of the problems, but I cannot shake the feeling that it is a horrible way to progress esp because it is taking too goddamn long in this way.
I talked to Nafey and he suggested that I should learn Javascript. Well okay then, I have been considering Javascript for some time now.
This is the guide that I intend to follow. It will take some time. It has crazy projects like Clone Reddit, Clone Twitter and so on. Lets see how much of it I manage to complete.
22 Oct 2017
Well, quite a long time has passed and I have not made any updates to this page. I have been meaning to update but something or the other keeps happening which keeps delaying me retrospectively as a result of which I am unable to add to this blog.
That doesn’t mean that I have not been writing. I have been writing, even though its only a fraction of how much I want to write.
Its also important to have dreams and I am still pursuing some of them. Still. I have been reading Calculus 1 by Apostol and its not easy. This is mathematics with a component of proof writing and the more I try to read this book, the more I understand why I flunked mathematics in my first year. It is completely different from anything of any sort that I have ever done before. I have decided to get into and understand how to read and write proofs. It is an important component of the mathematical education that is something that every math undergrad learns. However, I am not sure how to read proofs and especially how to do them. I feel like I will have a better time in dealing with the non proof portions and the computations but lately I am not even sure about that.
I have also been writing a sort of a journal, it is however more private and includes the kind of whiny nonsense you would expect from me. It is naive to write so its in a special program and stored in encrypted format so that it is not easy for others to get to, even though its nowhere near as embarassing to read as my old blog, which only exists because I am too sentimental to delete it.
I had originally envisioned this blog to be a kind of place where I recorded whatever technological stuff that I was learning or something like that. I am not really learning anything and whats more I am not expected to learn anything anymore, because now I am a banker and the most learning that I am expected to do at my job is about things like loans and advances which require you to know which forms to affix in a loan application and to judge and appraise loans etc. It is a learning of a different sort. I don’t know if I can do that. My father tells me that it is terribly easy but I find myself drawn to reading about mathematics or programming because on some level these are things that I have had the experience of trying to learn. I have looked at the books of finance etc that are meant for bankers(Indian more specifically covering our financial system) and I think that they are terribly vague and I have no idea how people learn from them.
A senior employee of the bank asked me to find out the logic behind why certain forms are required for certain loans, I am not sure if I know or even if I want to know. I hate this kind of uncertainity. I know that staying in my PhD was no longer an option but everyday I’m on the train to HJP, I find myself discovering new appreciation for my PhD. If only it didn’t get so moribund! Oh well no point crying over spilled milk, thats for sure.
Well, I guess this is it for now. I’ll add to this when I get the chance or I will blog more. I don’t really get the time but I will try.
03 Mar 2017
Getting Jekyll to work with Github Pages.
I finally got this working. Feelin’ nice yo. Here’s what I did. I installed Hyde on Github pages in the most cavalier way possible.
I read a lot of blog posts on how to get Jekyll up and
running on Github pages and they really did explain a lot but it just didn’t work for me at all.
I seriously read a huge blog post that started with
the idea of a command line and slowly built up from there on how to install and get things working.
I almost tried it, but it was for a page that would be a project page (and not an author page) so I felt like
it was not of much use to me.
I think I have used a very simple method (though it did take some trial and error to figure out) of running a Jekyll blog on Github. The best thing about it all is the fact that you don’t need to install anything on your computer to get it working other than git and an editor that supports markdown, I use and highly recommend Visual Studio Code.
Here are the steps that I used, in quite some brevity:
- Create a repository named yourusername.github.io
- Go to settings of your repository and select a theme to be used by your site. Just pick anyone, it doesn’t matter which.
- Clone your repository to your computer.
- Download the Hyde theme and save it on your desktop.
- Open the
_config.yml file in your repository.
- Copy over the contents of the
_config.yml of the Hyde folder into your repository’s _config.yml
- Go over the
_config.yml file in your repository and remove the theme: key and also the CNAME. Remove the entry about relative permalinks as that will cause Github to complain and fail to build your site.
- Change other settings such as names in the
_config.yml file.
- Copy over the rest of the content of the Hyde folder.
- Commit the changes. You might have to run
git add . while in the root of your repository to get it to stage all the files properly.
- head over to
yourusername.github.io and the site is live there.
- add new posts remove old ones, follow the post naming convention and also don’t forget to include the header that starts with three dashes in every post you make.
Now your site is up and running. Happy maintaining.
If you want to get a custom favicon, you will have to do some hacking. You need to replace the image files in the public folder. Replace the files, but ensure that you keep the same names for them. Also the bigger image has to be a size 144x144, so use any online image resizer. Then use an online favicon maker to turn that image into a favicon.
Finally, go to the file _includes/head.html and in the line with the favicon add a ? after the favicon.ico, but before the quote mark. Read more here.
Checking if math works:
\[E=mc^2\]
The instructions from this site got me working math. It does imply that I have to write \{\% include lib/mathjax.html \%\} at the end of every post that I want to display math on (without the backslashes), so I will have to see if there is a better option. I am, however, satisfied for now.
06 Feb 2012
Jekyll is a static site generator, an open-source tool for creating simple yet powerful websites of all shapes and sizes. From the project’s readme:
Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory […] and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server. This is also the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host your project’s page or blog right here from GitHub.
It’s an immensely useful tool and one we encourage you to use here with Hyde.
Find out more by visiting the project on GitHub.