I think by now everyone has left Etna for the year. I left around 6:30 last night and the only one left was Hassan (who happened to be passed out at the time). I’m pretty sure he left sometime last night, and with that, our house is closed down for the holidays. As the title to this post indicates, everyone leaving reminded me a bit of Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None.” From Tuesday onwards, the house emptied one person at a time, slowly but surely.

It’s going to be weird not seeing some of my best friends for the next month after I’ve gotten used to spending most of my time with them over the last semester. I will get to spend a lot of time with my family and my high school friends, so I’m sure break will still be good.

I guess all I really wanted to do here was wish everyone a happy holidays. Have a relaxing holiday break and enjoy the time with your families and friends!

I took a little time today to read some of the posts of my housemates, and I have to say I’m impressed. Not because I have any right to be, but because what started out as a foolish way to make money (Akshay, Hassan, and me on the stairs one evening), has turned into something so much more important. I can see the people in our house, including myself, using this as an avenue to share their thoughts and feelings that don’t usually come out of a guys mouth. While all of us at etnanine are great friends, guys aren’t usually ones to share some of the things I’ve read on this blog. We might have our emotional moments at times, but usually these are far and spread apart as well as incomplete. This isn’t to say guys don’t have deep conversations, I know we do all the time, but complete, articulated emotional thoughts like the ones I’m reading on etnanine are hard to come by from any guy. I know Akshay and recently Pavan started blogs partly (or mainly) for the purpose of sharing their thoughts and feelings that can’t come out through any other means. I dabbled in this as well with my old blog at shuklap.googlepages.com, which I think is still active. This blog for me is showing me a whole new perspective on some of my good friends that I never would have seen. These posts are adding an aspect of vulnerability to my friends and myself that guys are trained to avoid. This vulnerable side to guys is usually only revealed to close significant others and really good friends if at that, and I think it’s amazing that we are willing to now share this side with effectively the entire world (or anyone that can get on the Internet and surf to our site). Props.

On that note, I wanted to share something I’ve been thinking about recently. As a precursor, I didn’t realize or remember when I decided to write about this that Hassan’s latest post gets at much the same point I do (I think I read his post a couple days ago), but I still wanted to expand/share my thoughts because I’ve been having them for a while now. All of us at some point or another have failed to do something simply because we were afraid we would fail. It sounds irrational yet it is a disease everyone falls prey to at some point or another. Whether it be to speak up in defense of someone when you know you should, or join a club, or run for a position, or try something new, or practice that much harder, or study that much harder, all of us at some point have fallen short of our potential. Economics has taught me at least one valuable life lesson, in that you can’t compare what you’ve done to anything absolute, but rather to your potential. Not studying that extra hour that could make a difference on a test is a failure. If you know in your conscience you have studied everything possible only then can you truly reach your potential. Some of you might be thinking that not studying hard enough is just a sign of laziness, but I think there is more to it than that. Part of it might be the fact that all of us are somewhat lazy, but I believe that, at least for me, sometimes I’m afraid that I won’t do well after trying my hardest, and that isn’t a realization I want to come to, so I avoid working my hardest just to not prove myself insufficient. I’m not sure if anyone else knows what I’m talking about, but it’s something that I am going to work to change.

After a recent conversation at home with some old speech and debate friends, some of which are still in high school speech and debate, I’ve realized that I miss debate a lot. My goal either for next semester or next year is to give college-level Parliamentary debate a legitimate shot because I know I will regret not doing so once I graduate.

I want to wish everyone good luck on their finals, and I hope everyone that is reading this blog has a relaxing, refreshing break back at their respective homes. That isn’t to say that I’m hoping that people who aren’t reading this blog have a bad break, but you get my point.

-Prashant

Now this is going to read like some emo post from some random kid who just took a break from listening to avenged sevenfold and is about to go toke up. However that is not the intention.

I have always had random thoughts about why we are here, as I suppose everyone has because it is only natural to ask why. As a child, we grow up, wondering why plants grow, why things fall to the ground, or even why jadakiss is as hard as it gets(that just can’t be right…) But there are answers to all of those questions. Plants grow because of the sun, things fall because of gravity, and jada, we’ll he’s jada. But life has no answer. That is why religion was created, as an explanation of something that cannot be explained, as an answer to why.

However, that is not good enough for me. I can’t bring myself to believe that I should act only to attain heaven, when I can’t rationally confirm that there is a heaven there. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that those individuals who have this view on life are stupid or wrong, on the contrary, I envy them. If I could truly get myself to believe that when I died, I kept on going, I would have no worries in life. But I can’t. The rational part of my brain keeps denying it. So I search on.

If not religion and an afterlife, then what. What is left for all of the non-belivers out there in terms of life goals? If I do something brilliant, like creating a universal law or managing to beat that elusive pogo stick world record, won’t I still just die, and then I don’t care what I did, because I no longer am. So that can’t be it either, personal achievement can breed short term happiness, but cannot be valued as a life goal, because it is not transient, it simply dies with me.

I want something more. I want something that at the end of the day, lives on long beyond my dying breath. The only thing that then comes to mind, is to improve the world for future generations, so that they may one day find their own solution to life’s puzzle, and finally be able to answer the question of “why?” Even if I do not value life in the same way others might, at least I can give millions the chance to make up their own minds. So I guess my aim now, is to do something that helps everybody, to act towards a universal purpose, rather than a personal one. However, I am still not satisfied with this answer, and would greatly appreciate any thoughts.

I don’t think this post in any way does justice to my full range of thoughts, for I cannot seems to put into words the final conclusion which I have reached in my own brain. However for the time being, I might as we’ll just enjoy life to its fullest, try to improve it for others, and not really worry about if there is something beyond, because if there isn’t, then in the words of one famous pig, “thats all folks!”

Ladies and gentlemen,

I have ventured into blogging thanks to some inspiration from two friends, Akshay Krishnamurthy and Kevin Huynh. Akshay had been blogging for quite a while now, but only recently did I discover that Kevin has also been getting his feet wet in the world of internet expression. He took a DeCal, a student-run class at Berkeley, about blogging, in which all the students created their own blogs, which they may or may not update now. Regardless, it’s a great way to learn about basic website-building and coding, and Kevin recommends it to anyone interested in making his/her voice known.

Just over the past week I bought a domain and a hosting service, and I have churned out some very advanced HTML code. And by “advanced” I mean “not.” I’ve just been playing around with the features, and just kind of cherishing the fact that I have my own website to experiment with. The purpose is not only to express my deepest and darkest thoughts, but also eventually to learn Javascript and PHP.  After I put some random PHP and HTML code in there, I realized it looked a little dry, at which point I consulted the handy-dandy blogger.com. Clearly it does not take rocket science to realize that my site is still in its rudimentary stages. Please, don’t judge. You can do that after I put more offensive and confrontational posts on there. But in the meantime, please check out:

www.pavyedav.com

And of course, I give credit where credit is due. Please visit my inspirations’ sites as well:

www.kiwimonk.com/blog

www.akrish.net

Thanks everyone, and don’t think I won’t figure out if you’ve visited my site or not. I got some Google AdSense on there already. Yeah, impressive. I know. Man, what can I say, I’m kind of a big deal. Okay, enough patting on the back. I didn’t do anything of worth yet. Cheers.

So I’m waiting for Google to fix it’s maps service so that I can finish my CS project. My partner and his friends are playing games to kill the time and I thought I’d write something to kill the time. Since we all just got back to school after Thanksgiving, I figured that as I’m multi-tasking (as in waiting for my project to start working), I’d write about multi-tasking.

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I read a interesting article about multitasking. It was in The Atlantic, which by the way is one of the greatest magazines I’ve ever read, and it provided a lot of insight to the whole concept of multitasking. It was great because the writer (Istvan Banyai) used a lot of different voices and brought in substantial data from psychology and biology, while also contributing his own personal anecdotes and observations. I also really enjoyed it because you could tell that the writer was fairly young (I expect in late twenties) and, as a result, I related a lot more to his anecdotes making for a better experience.

Biologically, he claims that multitasking actually makes humans less intelligent as it hinders our memory. Multitasking essentially limits how our brains develop (a process which proceeds until twenty-plus years of age) and makes us less capable of remembering things. Personally, I can see this happening to me as I’ll be working on one thing, shift my focus to something else, and then when I go return to the first activity, I’ll have to back track a little bit because I’ve forgotten what exactly I did. Maybe that’s not the same, but he cited some biological data to validate his facts. Banyai argues that we’re actually less efficient when we multitask because we, “chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly.”

Banyai used an interesting analogy about human brains. We use our brains as we use the most technologically advanced devices. Before the computer age, our brains were seen as beakers of chemicals (i.e. they worked relatively magically), then during the major physics discoveries our brains were very mechanical. Now we compare our brains to CPU’s and think that they should be able to work like CPU’s. Obviously our mental facilities are very different from computers and we shouldn’t think that we can think the same way that computers work.

And obviously multi-tasking can be dangerous. We all know that talking on the phone while driving significantly increases the chance of an accident and there are several other scenarios where this is true.

So am I going to stop? Probably not. I’ve grown up with multi-tasking; I listen to music while doing homework, I work on other assignments while waiting for my code to compile, I talk to my friends in between physics problems, and I’ve done all these things since middle school. It’s in most of our natures to multi-task but I think we should all be aware of it and try to take tasks one at a time.

If you have Atlantic online membership you can read the article here.

After seeing what happened to ankit on Tuesday i decided i should get to the airport a bit early for my Thursday 8am flight and since everybody kept telling me that the airport was going to be packed at that time i decided to leave around 6ish. I somehow slept through all of my alarms and didn’t get up till 650, woke pav up and rushed to the airport. Luckily there was no traffic and security went by pretty fast so i actually ended up being on time. The moral of this is if you’re going to leave for the airport one hour before your flight, make sure its really early in the morning.

In other news i ended up watching Oprah on Thanksgiving because my parents were watching it and found some really interesting stories i wanted to share. The first is of an 11 year old girl who upon hearing about the aids crisis with children in Africa immediately took all of her own money and adopted a child with aids for a year. This girl was born with a rare liver disease and had to go through two liver transplants in the span of one year. Instead of accepting gifts like flowers from well wishers she asked them to donate to a foundation she created for the aids children. Imagine that, you’re on a hospital bed getting one liver after another and yet you’re thinking about helping others in any way that you can. Former President Clinton heard about this and personally went to her high school and brought her to the Oprah show. Some anonymous person who was traveling with Clinton donated half a million to this girls foundation. What really stood out to me was how unselfish this was on the part of the girl, she had no other motive but to help people in need.  I have always tried to think for the better of other people and not always about myself which is why i admire people like this little girl.

Another nice story i found from the show was of a website called www.kiva.org . Entrepreneurs in this country have all kinds of financial aid available to them to make their small company successful, but what about the entrepreneurs of third world countries? Thats where this website comes in, it provides a place where anybody can loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. The most amazing aspect of the site is the fact that 97% of the loans have been paid back, that is quite amazing considering people aren’t really sure of where they are loaning this money. Its people like the creators of this non profit company that show me how the web 2.0 generation can be used to help out people in need.

There was also a piece on the school Andre Agassi has created in Vegas which ill write about later. Check it out here if you want http://www.agassifoundation.org/ .

Hope everyone is having a good break.

-Saumil

I’m sitting at home watching the lakers game against the Bucks. Soon, I will recover my files from my network hard drive at home. My laptop still isn’t working, and I don’t think it will. I can’t get the hard drive slot to open now because one of the screws I put back in is broken and can’t open with a screwdriver. Sad story, but a good lesson -never ever play flip cup with vodka. Again sorry for keeping you awake so late spray I didn’t realize. Apologies to the house and chandani as well.

I’m using my mom’s laptop that she left at home before she went to India. I cleaned it up and it works pretty well, it’s the same fujitsu laptop I had but a different model, so I’ll probably just have this till December Break before i get a new laptop. Thinking about a mac. Also thinking about how etnanine is just turning into an open-ended chatroom for us in the house. I’m gonna peel to the couch with mah blanket to watch the rest of the game…

-Prashant

I got home for thanksgiving break a couple hours ago and I’m really excited for this break. It was really nice to see my brother again (I hadn’t seen him since May, 2007), and he actually came with my dad to pick me up and met some of my housemates which was pretty cool too. My mom baked some cake which is looking really good right now as I’m quite famished. But I’m just really excited to get a lot of sleep and recover from this stupid sickness that I have right now. Plus I’ll get to see all of my family and high school friends which is always good.

Unfortunately, there is a crap-load of work that I need to do during this break so I don’t really know if it will be all that relaxing. I have to catch up in all of my classes and I have a comp. sci. project due the Thursday after break. It’s going to be tough finding time for all my work when my mom has already scheduled like 3 things a day for the rest of the vacation. So I guess we’ll see how much I end up getting done.

Hope everyone has a great thanksgiving break, where ever you may be.

akshay

p.s. i just read a really interesting article about multi-tasking. I’ll try to write about it sometime soon (if i get around to it)

we have a beer pong table.

Hey guys. I’m in EE122 lecture right now. I’m just kind of bored because he’s discussing how to prioritize bandwidth based on user applications, which sounds tight, but indeed is not as cool as you may think. (Ir)regardless, I’ll be home in a few hours, and I was wondering what our plans are tonight, if any. Okay, back to Prof. Paxson.

–

Pavan

P.S. Leopard is pretty tight; Shay, it makes your computer run at a noticeably higher rate than Tiger did, which seems different from what one would think from a newer operating system (a la Vista), but it’s true. That was for you Tap. Blow me. Later.