Red Eye

We saw Red Eye the other night. Interesting. I wanted to like Red Eye, but it somehow didnt stand up to my expectations. The concept of being terrorized aboard a claustrophobic aeroplane in such a way that no one around you knows that you are being terrorized is interesting indeed. Before I go on to dissecting some aspects of the plot, I'd like to say that both the leads, Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy, have done an excellent job in their roles. The perpetrator does not seem physically challenging, but the evil twisted mind behind the seemingly harmless person is pretty chilling, I guess. Rachel, is pretty believable in her potrayal of Lisa - not overacted at all, pretty realistic, especially at the end when shes all ready to whack the villian real good with a bat.

But I see too many holes in the plot. The entire plan can fall down because of a few simple "what-ifs". The first thing is that the plan calls for Lisa to call from the air-phone. Now, what-if that particular plane was a somewhat older model that did not have those air-phones? Thats not a small variable at all. Not every plane has air-phones. Well, thank God for the fact that that plane did have air-phones, else there wouldnt be a movie. What if Lisa decided to stay over in Dallas that night? What if she didnt take that flight? The Homeland security person would be happy in his nice hotel suite, and the people on the boat would be still "fishing" out on the bay. Talking about boats, if the security people really wanted, they could have asked the boat to leave that spot completely to ensure 100% safety. There goes the shooting-the-missile-from-the-boat down the drain. What if there was an emergency the same night, and they had to give out that suite to some other customer before she made the call? Would they have asked the other customer to vacate the room?! When the girl in the hotel pulls the fire alarm, why dont the homeland security people already take the dude off the hotel? Why do they have to wait for her to come and tell them personally?

Over-all, I think Jackson Rippner wasnt a very intelligent whatever that what he was. He could have got his target in a manner which wasnt this complicated, with so many variables in play - airlines, aeroplanes, air-phones, boats, delays, coincidences, etc. And lastly, ok, she took your cell-phone, but dude, its an airport!! There are tons of public phones. You dont have a quarter?! And for God's sake, there are even free phones all over the airport!

Telephone number memory

An hour and 15 minutes in a presentation. I concentrated for the first 15-20 minutes.. Slowly, but steadily, as the presenter's content matter sailed onto deeper seas, my understanding of it started diminishing till a point where I could hear sentences, but not make any sense out of them. Since I had a good nights sleep last night, I wasnt about to let my ship sail off into the pleasurable vastness of deep slumber. So, I decided to do some activity:

I took a piece of paper and decided to write down all the telephone numbers that I could remember. The telephones nowadays keep a record of all the numbers dialled, quick dialling facilities, voice activation, so on and so forth. So, its very rare that we actually dial a phone number. If you were given a phone, how many people could you call without looking up their phone number? My mini quest was an answer to this question.

As it turned out, I could remember only 21 phone numbers! 21!! Only 21! Of all the people whom I interact and talk and meet and all, only 21! Moreso, about 4 numbers are my home phone numbers. So, dialling them would be essentially dialling my mom and dad.

How many numbers can you remember? Let me know!

Done!

I finally finished my Masters in Computer Science! I defended my thesis successfully last Thursday. It feels really good to have done with it. It did take a couple of semesters more than what I had thought I'd finish it in. But I enjoyed the journey. I guess I'd stick by "alls well that ends well."

Now lets see where life takes me..

Top 10 list

Ok, last night, when I was driving back home from Jackson, I was thinking about nice warm food.. This was after I spent a good 20 minutes thinking about my new found favorite food, which is in the previous post. This post is an ode to all of those foods that I enjoy the most. Since the exercise of remembering and typing out all might take a while, this is a top 10 list. For the record, this list is a set rather than an ordered list.

The first that comes to mind is definitely paani-puri that you get at Prashant Corner, in Thane. It is the best in the world. You can quote me on this. Its about a 5 minute walk from our home. A close runner-up is GuriKripa in Sion - somewhat similar taste. Every paani-puri I have had is evaluated with reference to Prashant's offerings, and none have come even close to my benchmark. The texture, taste and crispness of the puri, the temperature of the water, the sweetness and heat of the chutneys is what takes Prashant's paani-puris on a different plane altogether. No offence to anyone, but the paani-puris what we get in the US are hopeless. Period.

Chicken/mutton biryani that my grandmother makes. Truly wonderful. Warm, fluffy rice, sometimes with a little color added, very well cooked meat, and delectable masala. Always present at family gatherings, and a source of familial bonding for all of us!

Mutton masala - Hotel Satkar in Thane. Rich, almond gravy. Excellent masala. Good to have once in a fortnight.

Samosas - nothing ever compared to the samosas that we used to get in our school canteen. Samosas were every Tuesday and Thursday only. And they were more triangular than like a pyramid.

Kanda Pohe - that my mom makes. Standard breakfast Sunday morning. Beats having cereal anytime! Also, kanda pohe at "Kshanbhar Vishranti", a hotel on the way from Mumbai to Goa needs to have a special mention.

Masala dosa and sambar - Puja Snacks. A miniscule Udipi restaurant in Thane. The dosas in the deep south of India wouldnt probably be much different.

Flan - that my friend Matt makes (only very rarely though, and that too, only after a tremendous amount of persuasion.) I tried flan at some other places, but non were as good as what Matt makes.

Chicken Marsala - Olive Garden. Yumm!

Shepu chi bhaaji - that my mom makes. I think shepu is what dill is. I remember the first time I had shepu in my lunch box in school. I opened my box, and didnt know what it was. But it looked nice and green, so I tasted it. And, like a cliche, I got hooked onto it from day 1. So is the case with Abhijit. We loved it, and mom was happy that the kids were eating green veggies!

Tomato soup - Hotel SaiKrupa, Thane. Benchmark case again. Used to have it whenever we used to go there for dinner. I still love it, and wouldnt pass up an opportunity to have it again. (Abhijit always used to take my croutons though.)

I think I found my favorite food ever!

Yep! It is like it sounds. So, I was on a lunch interview, and I scan the menu and decide on this one dish that seemed alluring. After some corporate discussions, the food came out. And I try my dish - and Ohh God! It was soo delicious! It was like nothing I had before! It had the perfect blend of tastes. Delicious is what you'd generally describe food as.. However, I dont ever remember saying - the food is delicious. The food is always "awesome", or "excellent", or "pretty good". But this time, the food was "delicious". It was delicious indeed! Perhaps it may be the case that I was hungry after a gruelling day of interviews, with not a good amount of nutrional value intake from the morning. But I think I will place this dish on the top of my favorite food pedestal anyway. Thinking of it is making my mouth water!

So, its the "Carmela Chicken Rigatoni" at Romano's Macaroni Grill. Ohh its delicious. Its got a generous helping of perfectly cooked rigatoni, with an amount of chicken which is just enough - neither very less to crave for more, nor very much to stuff the stomach. There are carmelized onions. Now who wouldnt like that?! If the cooks in Heaven had a secret ingredient, I'm sure it would be carmelized onions! The taste that they impart, their shiny brownish color, they're just delectable. Theres a touch of basil which gives it the Italian flavor. And then theres the creamy Marsala wine sauce with cheese. Write it down - if you are offered a dish with a creamy Marsala wine sauce, DO NOT pass it over; you will regret it later.. mark my words. The aroma that leaves the bowl and stimulates the smell neurons when you are eating it, and entrenches itself in your head for a good 24 hours, that makes you think the world is just a wonderful place to be in, is just ecstatic! The taste - a combination of the pasta and chicken, with the basil and onion Marsala sauce will take you for a trip around Cloud 9. After you finish the bite, you'll be back for another bite.. and then you are off again! I think I'm off right now, even thinking about it...

The Skeleton Key

Last night, we saw The Skeleton Key. It was a good change from the recent horror movies that we've seen - there wasnt as much blood, and gore, and flesh, and bear traps, and syringes. I guess, we can call this as an old-fashioned horror movie; one with ghosts instead of demented people trying to disfigure other almost demented people. There were parts of it which were creepy, but the whole movie wasnt as scary as the trailers of it were (of which I remember faintly), or perhaps our horror-tolerance level has gone up pretty high (I would like to mention here, thanks to movies such as SAW I/II, and House of Wax, to name a few.)

The most intruiging part of the whole movie that I felt was the house itself. It was the sole piece of man-made construction for miles. No one, nothing around for miles but the swamp. The cold, damp driveway, the dark halls.. All this in itself is creepy, and we havent talked about ghosts in it as yet! Wouldnt all of us like to live in a warm place? Think again. Well, if you have seen Dark Water, the setting in it is completely antithetic. The apartment complex in it is in New York. Its bang in the middle of everything. Theres people, other buildings, a factory of some sort across the river, parks, cars, buses, a couple of very busy, heavily trafficked bridges, even a cable car for that matter. Now, if youve seen that movie, I'm sure you remember what a scary place that was too! The two settings are stark contrasts of each other, but the story-tellers have done a great job to scare us in both of them!

Toolbar test

Ok, I'm trying the new Google toolbar that has the Blogger feature inbuilt in it. Now, I wont have to log into or open the Blogger website to post new posts. I can do it in the browser itself. Hmm, let me see if this works.

Go Genetic List Scheduling!

So, the staying up late trying to work out margins and line spacings in Word were well-spent after all. After I came back from India in January, I was working on this paper that my professor and I were going to submit to this conference. Late last week, we learnt that the paper has been accepted! It will be published in the proceedings of ACM's Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2006) to be held in July in Seattle, WA. I hope I can get to go to present it, or at least be there for its presentation. If any of you land up there, please do listen to our presentation!