RoboCup 2008 Day One, Two

• Woke up on time, even though we were 2.5 hours ahead of IST. All those nightouts did pay off .

• Breakfast was OK.
• Bland scrambled eggs.
• Bread and butter.
• Boiled eggs.
• The rest were too horrible looking to even try.
• On the way to the “mess”, I saw some kids ferociously training in the NCC way, can only assume it is for the Red Army.

• The communication problem has become a big headache. People here just do not understand simple English. We are using sign language and specific keywords to make any sense to them. However, there are some people who do know some English.

• China reminds me of America, the lifestyle here is so similar to that of the Americans. How ironic, given the diametrically opposite nature of the governments.
• For example, take the road system which is “right” oriented.

• Completed team registration and entered the exhibition rooms, and my first conference. Apparently the International Expo Centre at Suzhou (pronounced as Sew-Joe) is larger than the one in Hitex, which I have never been to.

• Covered the entire ground in about 45 minutes.
• RoboCup Rescue Simulation.
• Some teams were already there, working on their codes.
• Had the opportunity to finally meet Mr. Tomoichi Takahashi. It is a privilege to even sit beside him.
• His team has come up with a component by which one can import Google Maps and thus use real map data for simulations.
• Met an Iranian team for the Infrastructure competition. They introduced emotions for rescue agents which, as pointed by Harith is bullshit because robots are used for the very reason that humans succumb to their own fears and other emotions. We will just have to see what they have to say tomorrow.
• RoboCup Rescue.
• Real life scenarios, limited to finding the civilians placed at some places in the map. Interesting!
• 2D Soccer.
• Virtual Reality Rescue.
• Aibo Soccer.
• Looked dumb, however some of the goal keeper’s saves were cool.
• Small Soccer League.
• Small wheeled robots, quick, high speed passing including long balls, observable team work.
• Medium Soccer League.
• Big wheeled robots, a lot of “Cronaldo” behaviour (which means SELFISH game). Then again, it must be the teams right?
• Humanoid Soccer League.
• The smaller humanoids looked cool, well balanced.
• The life size models required a person to hold on to its back while walking. Purpose served?
• Water Polo with fish.
• Unlike the original game, the ball in this game is never in the air. The fish looked a bit real from a distance, until the familiar sounds of whirring gears caught out attention.
• Home Assistant.
• To server us coffee, clean rooms and prepare dinner. Boring!
• RoboCup Junior.
• School kids putting their creativity at battles with one another in Rescue and Soccer.
• Robo Dance.
• By far the most pathetic competition. Maybe the teams are to be blamed because all I saw were a couple of robots simply rocking back and forth to some stupid beat while humans danced around them trying to make it look like everything is SO spontaneous.
• Good Stalls.
• Many commercial robot manufacturing companies showcased their products.
• Got a cool poster from the RoboCup 2009 @ Graz (pronounced as Gratz), Austria stall.
• Small demo of the NAO robot, looked nice. Apparently the usual price of one such humanoid is 10000 Euros. However, for the “sake” of RoboCup, they put up a special offer, “Buy 1, Get 3 FREE!”.

• Bathrooms stink! Well that will never be the case if the guys try to “aim” rather than you-know-what!

• Some of the girls are very pretty, mostly Iranians and some Europeans too.

• “Zee Germans” have pretty good physique, so it is not just Schweini! Well that kind of applies to all those Nordic descendants. A prefectly _straight_ point, no comments.

• The food, OMG – where do I even start!

• Fish sandwich, pasta (looks and tastes like crap), pizza (local bakeries in India bake better that these) and some Chinese buffet provided here, costing an average of RMB 35.

• Walked around the Expo Centre (more than 2km) in search of some place to eat. The map was of no help to us because even the locals could not make any sense of it. Finally ended up eating at the stupid “food court” in the centre.

• Living on stuff like biscuits and ice tea, SAD!

• Might be going to an Indian restaurant the day after tomorrow, yippee!

• There is a KFC approximately 7 minutes away and the nearest Pizza Hut is twice as far (McDonalds is much farther and Subway is not even on the map), so I guess tomorrow it will have to be KFC

• The opening ceremony could not have gotten any geekier, with a Star Wars theme in the background. And then there were robot dances, lame!

• 2D Soccer looked really interesting, one particular team was playing a sexy short pass game just like Arsenal .

• Observed a couple of through ball passes made by actual robots, looked very impressive, although it was just a mathematical equation

• Very weird people around.

• The RoboCup Junior party hosted the day before kind of sucked because the electric guitar was not working properly. Apparently the person who was supposed to play it was really good at it.

• Had some Lays chips for dinner, tried to swallow them with the help of some stupid tasting lemon ice tea – sucked!
• These Chinese people have no extremes at all. I actually found “Blueberry” and “Litchee” flavoured Lays chips. WTF!!! Samba on the other hand would say, “Cool!”. LOL.
• Being a non-vegetarian, even I feel so repelled by the odours that come from their kitchens. I wonder how Sir is taking it =)). What is wrong with adding a few pinches of salt and pepper? All these people think that food must be tasted in its natural flavour, or else it must be sweet (Wrong sentence, lite).
• All I could see in the lunch menu was pork, cow, sweet pork, shredded cow, duck, blah, blah.

• Enough of complaing and LOLing for today. We have our presentation tomorrow. After that it will most likely be a trip to The Great Wall. I read a quote on men somewhere which went somewhat like this, “If you have not seen The Great Wall, then you cannot call yourself a man”. LOL.

A Visit to an iStore

Few months back, the plastic covering over the AC charger that came with Revanth’s MacBook melted (I believe the reason was overheating) and the wires inside went FUBAR. I felt sad (for him) every time I watched him set up a fragile arrangement by tweaking those tiny wires till the green light came on, only to be accidently disturbed by some random guy passing by, lost in his own thoughts. The incident made me lower my respect for Apple (Not that it was high before), because Apple, with such innovations, failed to see such a simple point!

A few weeks ago, Apple announced the opening of its largest iStore in USA, in New York City. I then checked if there was an iStore close to my place. And of course, I found one in Northpark Center Mall in Downtown Dallas, the largest and poshest mall I have been to till date.

So Revanth asked me to get a new charger for him ($85!). When I went online to place an order, I could not help but notice that not even a single comment/review under the product description was positive. The product itself was rated 1.5/5 stars. I thought Revanth’s case was an extreme one, probably one in a ten thousand. However, the probability now seemed to be even more and guess what? Most of the customers complained about the meltdown.

Well this was my chance. A 30 minute drive and viola!

The tiny store stood out among all the shops in the mall, just like its products – simple, white, clean, angelic. There was so much of white in the store that it really made me sick. There were more sales executives than customers (Mind you, this is Downtown Dallas and is packed with high class customers). OK! So Apple is always prepared, nice. There were two arrays of tables with the latest products on display, including the MacBook Air and iPhone (Which by the way is out of stock) of course. WHITE and BORING! I went to a guy and asked for the charger, because I wanted to get to get out of that place ASAP (I guess I will be going to hell, I cannot take all the white in heaven, lol). He called up some other guy and asked me to wait for a couple of minutes. Now what was I supposed to do for those couple of minutes? Why not check out the iPhone? I touched the screen to open the browser and oops! My fingerprints were on the screen, and I noticed all those smudges made by customers before me. It really spoiled the look of the screen. I then remembered an argument Kirthi and I had about the iPhone’s screen (I believe this was before the meltdown incident). Kirthi kept telling me that Mr. Jobs would have obviously considered the smudges issue and must have developed some way to counter it. And in fact he did, I saw some sales representatives occasionally cleaning the screens using some cloth.

And I think I pissed off one of the guys because the first and only thing I did on the iPhone and MacBook Air was browse through http://www.microsoft.com/ while he was looking. ROFL!

All in all, it was a very enjoyable trip to the mall. I ate an original SUBWAY sandwich (The details of which shall be posted later!), listened to a live musical performance, by an orchestra, of the latest Indiana Jones movie and had a good long walk in the mall, not the mention the visit to iStore!

Mothers’ Day

It has been a week since I have come here to spend a month in my summer vacation with my parents. And a week well spent with a lot of discussions with parents, cooking and eating excellent homemade food. Now that we have a router, I have access to the Internet 24/7. However, that was not the case before. Chelli and I kept fighting as always for time on the Internet. I need it to stay in touch with my friends and she needs it to do some stupid stuff, as always. So when she was hogging the laptop, the only form of entertainment available was TV with basic connection comprising of 40 odd channels. The Food Network and TBS happen to be the only channels with any interesting shows. Of course, Monday is CBS time. I get to watch the latest HIMYM, BBT and 2.5 Men episodes before my college does, HA!

Anyway, during these 7 days of my stay here, I could not help but notice the propaganda carried out for Mothers’ Day. It felt like the TV shows and movies were being showed in the breaks between the advertisements rather than the other way round, seriously!

1) “What are you getting for your dearest mother on this Mothers’ Day? A card, jewelley, dress?”
2) “Mothers’ Day sale, 50% discount!”
3) “Free lunch buffet for all women on the occassion of Mothers’ Day!”

LOL.

I have always wondered about the necessity of celebrating a Mothers’ Day. Why do people celebrate it? Do we really need a day to make it all women feel special? Then one might as well argue against the celebration of more established days like Birthday, Wedding and Death Anniversary. They have been looking after us since Day 1 and will continue to do so as long as it is physically possible for them. Giving your mother a day off and some gifts does not make up for the hardships faced by her during her daily routine in keeping her family happy, healthy, safe and united. Our mothers know how well they are appreciated by us. The little things that we do everyday to help her in whatever way possible deliver to her the message of love and appreciation that no other gift can.

The occassion sounds more like, “Happy Mothers’ Day amma! Thank you for all the things you have done for me till now. Here is a gift as a token of gratitude. Keep up the good work!”

However, after looking at the people here, I feel that they really need such a day after all. In a society where kids are left to fend for themselves since childhood, where they are encouraged to leave home after their 18th birthday, the need for such special days exists. The sons and daughters take it as a daunting task to even call up their parents, let alone meet them. An appointment needs to be taken by one family member to meet another. Everything has to be so formal here. So they celebrate Mothers’ Day, one of those 7 to 10 special occassions out of 365, and get back to their daily lives the very next day. I feel sorry for them, not to mention adoption of business tactics to capitalize on this issue. The sad thing is that this culture has been in existence since time immemorial, hence has very deep roots in society, and only some people realized the flaw and took the appropriate steps.

The thing which depresses me is the 180 degree change in the thinking process of Indians who come to America. After experiencing the freedom here, they start believing that American culture is superior to ours in every sense. They forget the K, P and T taught to them and instead learn Khe, Phee and Thi. It reminds me of a small joke by Russell Peters, an very good comedian, in which he points out the strange behaviour in immigrants who use American accent only when speaking English and use their native accents otherwise. I have observed that everywhere. I too did it for a couple of months in my childhood and then stopped as I found it extremely stupid. And it does not stop there, the mindset slowly turns towards the Live-Life-Independently ideology. The Indians here know what they are doing and yet, they continue doing them.

It must be understood that I am referring to the majority here, in Indians as well as Americans.

I was watching this movie, Mom, Dad and Her the other day. Almost all movies made here involve a seperated couple. And so did this one. The stupid thing about this movie though, which probably was the main reason for its poor rating of 2.8 in IMDb, was this part where the teenage daughter of the seperated parents releases her frustration over the divorce after her grandfather’s death, so typical right? In order to console their child and to make feel more independent, the parents conducted a Divorce Ceremony, similar to Birthdays and other anniversaries. Yes, you read that right, a Divorce Ceremony, to celebrate their passage into new lives. WTF . Apparently they read about such a ceremony in a book, most probably written by another American.

So a new day added to the calendar, Divorce Anniversary.
Correction: new days added to the calendar, Nth Divorce Anniversary. I do not even want to get started on this topic now.

1. Mothers’ Day
2. Fathers’ Day
-soon to come-
3. Sons’ Day
4. September 23rd Day (some random date)
5. Glad To Be Still Alive To Celebrate Today Day
6. Anything else that needs to be invented? The greeting card companies are probably blowing their brains out at this very moment for new ideas.