Day 27, Wednesday, Programming

I'd felt that my programming was lagging behind a bit, so I spent the whole day on that.

It was extremely frustrating as my latency during the day to my server at Dreamhost was terrible.

Our bandwidth is supposed to be 256kbps, or 32kB/s. It seems decent at night. We can't watch YouTube or quickly download large files, but, we can do simple tasks like check email. I had thought about upgrading our connection to something faster, but I decided I couldn't afford it.

During today's work, it seemed terrible. It was the first time I thought of moving back home just so that I could have a working, functional, internet connection.

I spend almost all of my time in my apartment reading, cooking, writing, or writing code - there is no point in me being in a place where I can't afford internet services, yet require them for my project. It was a frustrating moment. I was going to write an email to Airtel's tech support, but I calmed down a bit, took a break, and tried to work with what I had. I manually downloaded some things in small pieces. I gave up trying to accomplish anything on the remote server, and waited until the evening, when my latency might improve, to work on the deployment problems.

By the time the day was over, I had solved all of the problems that I intended to solve when I started the day. I was happy. My application is now live at projectrick.mikedll.com. It doesn't seem to do anything yet, but the features are coming...

It is a working deployment of Ruby on Rails, version 2.2.2. My laptop also mirrors that environment and allows me to develop new features locally. I am use Git, which I just learned today, for version tracking. It keeps all versions synchronized. Syncplicity also creates backups of my files.

I was happy when I made a local change and saw it appear on the public website. The website is not dynamic yet, and it is featureless, but it is indeed serving both static and dynamic content. I am still writing basic specifications (in agreement with some leaders in today's software world, and in disagreement with others) for the first, basic, feature. I have gone through a couple redesign steps already while just writing the spec, as the former predicts I will, so I think I have saved myself some time.

I turned in at 11:30pm. Tomorrow I am thinking of taking a Holiday and going out and doing some other random tasks. I am behind on some of these random tasks. We'll see.

Day 26, Tuesday, More peaceful studying

Studied biology for two and a half hours. Bio study is going well and becoming a habit. Today, I examined classical metabolism, which will include glycolysis, the krebs cycle, and the electron transport chain. I focused on glycolysis today. At some points, had a hard time concentration and got distracted by trying to make a Ruby program to "implement" a model of these metabolic processes.

Studied math for four hours. It's taken me 26 years to find out what a rational number is. I didn't know that the numerator and denominator of a rational number had to be integers. This came up in one of today's exercises. It also came up a couple months ago while reading Russell's History of Western Philosophy, and I began to wonder about it.

Worked on my programming project for 4 hours. Solved a problem that should've only taken me a little while... But at least I solved it.

Day 25, Monday, Peaceful day of work

Maintained the clean kitchen this morning - roach count remains down.

Saw Nayak arriving on his bike as I stepped out this morning.

Rashida stopped by and did a lot of laundry for us.

Cut my hair. When I cut my hair, I bend down toward my feet while keeping my legs straight. This stretches my hamstrings and calves, and helps me avoid getting hair all over my body. If I get hair on my body, it sticks to my body and stays there for a couple days. It's a way for me to do two things at the same time.

Sent out a resume to LingAbility. It's for a position as a tourism guide. I am late in responding to a July 22nd Ad, though, so that has hurt my chances.

Learned how to deploy my project on my webhost. I do not have a complete solution for my problem, however. Worked on my programming project for three hours; mostly fussed around with deploying Rails on Dreamhost, which is difficult. I am able to deploy some sample applications, but I'm struggling with static route of content.

Struggled with some blogging platform decisions.

Too tired at night, though, and didn't do the dishes last night, and there would be a small surge in the roach count the next day.

Day 24, Sunday, Going to Total Mall

I went to Total supermarket today. It is like Disneyland, there. After not having been there in over a week, it was great to see all the stuff they have lying around. They have everything; cooking utensils, trash cans, food, vegetables, healthy food, unhealthy food. They have cell phones.

On my way out, I had a light bulb moment. There was a huge advertisement by the checkout aisle, and it showed that you could get gift cards. I asked about it and got one for Rs. 500. This is a great tool, because I can afford to carry it instead of carrying my much more valuable credit card. If I lose it, it's not as big of a deal. It's also rechargeable. I love it. Since I still don't have a bank account, this is great. But even if I did have a bank account, I'd still love it. I wish the supermarkets had them in the United States. Maybe they do but I never bothered to ask?

I also forgot how busy Airport road is. Bangalore is a much busier place than I remember. I've spent so much time on 100 feet road and that's a lot quieter and Airport road.

I purchased more cleaning supplies - cleaning gloves, scrotchbrite scrubby thingies, steel scrubby thingies, a new tupperware to replace one that I ruined this morning, and other stuff. I got food, too. I finally got my first almonds - about six dollars. I got whole wheat pasta, too. The sugar to carb ratio on the whole wheat pasta is incredible.

Today I had Moong Dal, Pasta, and an orange. This will become a regular meal soon.

My workout in the gym this morning went well. I worked on legs; I had worked on my chest yesterday and I didn't want to work on my arms the day after, thinking that my arms would be tired by relation with my chest.

My energy level was high in the morning, and it stayed that way for hours after the workout.

Our maid returned today. She had been missing for a few days. She said her mom had an accident and got sick, or something. I don't know exactly what happened - Ankit gave me the gist of it.

Even though she wasn't here, we had done a good job cleaning things up. The roach count remains down; I only see several throughout the day now. I used to see over a couple dozen.

The beautiful sun is out among blue skies. So far, the weather has remained between 70 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit. When it rains, it clears the skies and calms down the city, like a reduced effect of how snow can silence a town.

Day 23, Saturday, A fast-paced morning and slow evening

Before leaving Redlands, I left a computer at my old job with a coworker. Last night, he called me with a question about it. It was about 1pm in the California afternoon when he called, or 1:30 am in the early Indian Saturday morning. He called my Skype online number. Skype recorded his voicemail, and emailed me to notify that I had one.

Half an hour later, I woke up in the middle of the night, as commonly happens. My iPod was with me inside my mosquitoe net. Out of bad habit, I checked my email on it, and saw the email from Skype. With the Skype application on my iPod, I checked my voicemail and listened to his message.

To respond, I fired up the device's Safari web browser, navigated to Gmail, and emailed him. After that I fell back asleep.

I woke up at 6am to my iPod's alarm after a solid seven hours of sleep. I got out of bed after five minutes of lying awake, and turned on my computer. Because I failed to write much yesterday, I immediately sent off a couple emails instead of going to the gym.

I made it to the gym at by 7. The security guard was tired and expressionless. At this hour, there were a few other men in the gym. Later around ten in the morning, women begin to show up and have it to themselves.

I warmed up, and worked on my back and chest. I can only do one pull up.

I have three mosquitoe bites from yesterday. While I talked to my grandmother, I was standing outside on our balcony, and a very hungry mosquitoe took three bites along different joints of my index finger, even as I tried to discourage it. It seems that when a mosquitoe wants to feed on me, it aggressively hovers toward my skin. It doesn't go away if I "shoo" at it, like a fly will.

I came back to my room, had breakfast, wrote some more, and showered. I took an hour to go to the market.

Having that done, I surfed the web for news for awhile. I examined new web services including The Sixty One for streaming music through the internet, Posterous as an extremely simple blogging tool, Picwing for automatically sending printed photos to loved ones, and Heroku for simplified hosting of rails applications.

I continued writing, and deployed Script.aculo.us on my homepage. Installation worked as advertised.

Tonight there was another programming contest, but I didn't participate. I should have.

Day 22, Friday, Being Lazy

I woke up at 6am and shuffled my way down to the gym. I wanted to come up with an exercise for my hip adductors. I didn't have one, like I do for the hip abductors. I am thinking of putting my foot into the hand grip of the cable machine, and pulling toward my center.

After the gym, I spent the rest of the day in my room just surfing the web. I had planned on doing a lot of writing, but the atmosphere of my room, for whatever reason, made me feel like doing nothing instead. This is a feeling I remember at home - just locking myself up and surfing the web. It's not just an avoidance of work; it's an avoidance of everything. I don't even want to get up to eat at these moments.

Tonight it started pouring around 8pm. I felt extremely sore from the gym.

Day 21, Thursday, Whey Protein Powder

On the day before I left the US, I called to have my credit cleared for Paris (for one day) and finally for all of India. Today I tried it out, and indeed it seems to be working. It will take a day or two for me to calculate the exchange rate that I am getting, and how much Mastercard is charging me.

Today's new food items:

• $2lb container of Optimum Nutrition's whey ( $40.00 - in the US this its $25)
• Red Kidney Beans

The Red Kidney beans are designed to provide a variety of protein, yet be different from chic peas.

The whey protein powder is a huge life-saver, though. I've been looking forward to getting it for days. It provides 24g of protein a day. This will be critical in the mornings, because I've been entirely missing a good source of protein in the mornings (other than the couple of grams that I get from Oatmeal, and that is incomplete).

I spent time in the evening working on my app for a little while, and reading my biology book.