2008 in Review

Now, now, now. We meet again! What a pleasure to see you back after four long terrific years! To be perfectly honest with you, I certainly didn't think this year would be as awesome as it has turned out to be. Well, what can I say? It is indeed a glorious fortune to be able to come back after literally 4 years and retell my story and open it up for scrutiny. 4 years!! Tomorrow, I shall gleefully flip yet another page of my life, commencing a brand new chapter with brand new ambitions and brand new vocations, and of course, a brand new pair of socks. (My old pair got rather smelly and tattered.)

The year 2008 has just whizzed past us, hasn't it? Today, as we stand on the threshold of the year 2009, I want to take a moment to look back and assess my achievements and failures. This year has been so varied; I've seen so many ups and downs that I just don't know where to begin. An unprecedented number of disasters and catastrophes, rains, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, you name it. Nature is very politely informing us to quit meddling with her. Take the clue.

At 12 AM Jan 1 2008, I got up from the chair I had been sitting in over the last 2 hours watching Vasoolraja MBBS to wish my family and relatives a very Happy New Year. 30 minutes later, I was in a taxi to the Anna International Airport in Chennai, India. I said a hasty goodbye to my parents since I wasn't going to see them for 8 months. I dutifully checked-in my baggage, did security, and found out, much to my chagrin, that my plane was to be delayed 1.5 hours. Damn this! They were giving out free cupcakes to compensate for the delay, but there was only one for every 3 people. I wasn't Indian enough to fight for more cupcakes. Fast forward 10 hours, and I'm sitting in London's Heathrow, bored out of my life. I had a 3 hour wait there, and there was no free wireless. Fast forward 4 hours and I was in Toronto's Pearson waiting for the Airporter to take me home. Fast forward 1 hour, it's 11 PM Eastern and I'm standing outside my home on Lester St. in Waterloo fishing for cash in my wallet because apparently the Airporter hadn't processed my credit card the night before. And there's a foot of snow on my doorstep. I carry all my luggage two flights of stairs into my room, call my family in India to let them know I had reached safely, hastily eat something packed the previous night, and rush off to sleep. I had work the following morning. So I get into my bed, and I realize the temperature in the house is about 2 degrees—just a factor of 10 off from what it should have been. The last roommate to leave for the Winter holidays had turned off the heater before he left to save gas. Oh crap. I rush downstairs to turn on the heater, except the heater was crappy and it generally took 5 hours to heat up the whole house. And I had no bedside heater with me. I put on 3 layers of clothing, my winter jacket, a pair of tattered jeans, socks, gloves and my toque. I wrap myself around with my comforter like a mummy. I agree with myself there's something soul-sucking about sleeping alone in a large house that is freezing cold. I was so exhausted by now that I fell asleep in less than 2 minutes. But not before I stuck my hand in my jeans pocket. I took out a slip of paper and held in the moonlight. Recognizably, there was my writing on it. It said "Murphy". I chuckled to myself. The next morning, I was at the Tatham Center, 2nd floor, at 8:59 AM sharp, ready for work. My boss despised unpunctuality with a passion.

My life until last year can be visualized as two concentric circles and a square. Technology, the square, used to be the prized possession sitting in the middle. I would then be circling technology and everyone else would be circling me. This year however, everyone else is standing on top of technology, and I'm circling both technology and the people standing on top of it. It has been all about people, people, people. And technology. And thankfully, as a result of this, the world has become a much smaller place for me.

Last year, I celebrated New Year's at Chennai, India. This year I'll be celebrating it in Vancouver. It'd be cool if I celebrated each New Year at a different city. "Dream on, kid. Who are you kiddin? Get real." But why not dream? Dreams are like seeds waiting to germinate. Almost everything I've achieved so far, out there, in the field, started off as an innocent dream some morning when I was awake but too lazy to get off my bed to go brush my teeth. This only gives me more incentive to dream more, to dream effortlessly, and to dream endlessly.

I took about 1500 photos this year. That's much less than what I took the previous year. The quantity may be going down, but I feel the quality's been going up. Of the 1500, only a mere 103 made it into telescopy. I also find myself having to take fewer pictures of the same thing before I get it right. I've learned a ton from other photographers, mostly by looking at their photos and trying to figure out what's good, what's bad. Facebook and Flickr are so awesome that way. My favorite photo of the year hands down is this, taken on the pier at Clearwater Beach, Clearwater, Florida.

Going to a tri-semestered university like the University of Waterloo is great because it clearly separates your calendar year into 3 thirds: Winter, Spring, and Fall. So I'm going to use this natural separation to reflect on the happenings of this year.

Significant happenings or things I am proud of this year:

Winter 2008

1. Achieved URI milestone with Prof. Miguel Anjos for engaging in a part-time targeted research project from Sep '07 to Apr '08. Report here. I did stuff related to the satisfiability problem. I definitely learned a ton of new stuff. Basically ended up combing through every line of the book Optimization Methods for Logical Inference. I'm actually pretty proud of this milestone since Miguel made me work hard for it. At the end of the term, I was asked to give a presentation detailing my findings in front of a panel of 10 graduate students, PhDs and post-docs. Man, I was grilled. But I managed fine because I was excited about going to an all-you-can-eat sushi place after with my three best friends.

   

2. Worked on a key part of Jobmine 2.0—the Configurator. Jobmine is the software used at the University of Waterloo to manage the 11000+ co-op interviews a year. It's like monster.com, only on steroids. The Configurator is a piece of software written in C# that essentially configurates and bootstraps the entire system. This took me about 3 months to write and debug. I learned a lot of C# after this project.
3. Some great friendships and connections. Some really awesome people entered my life. Some of these friendships also went on to offer me jobs at great startups. Built a collage and honored some of them, if not all, by tagging them.
4. Going Public — Significantly increased Facebook, Twitter, and GTalk usage. Finally started to understand some of this social networking stuff and microblogging.

Spring 2008

5. Went skydiving — Pictures here. Video here. Jun 7 2008. I had been saying no to this for such a long time. And then one fateful morning, I grew a pair and just went and did it. I became Yes Man for once. There's something truly exhilarating about the free-fall experience that is impossible to put in words. Or maybe possible, haha (7:12 in the vid).

   

   Google Video embed since Facebook so graciously decided to pull down my video because of the use of the copyrighted background music:

6. Took 8 courses & 2 labs in 3A. Post mortem here. At one point, I was pulling 70 hour work weeks. It was intense. I had to push my time management skills to the max. Some of my friends called me nuts. Others went holy guacamole. But I realized the feat isn't so hard if you know how to micromanage your time to the minute and take advantage of technology. I was primarily using MS Outlook, a paper-based agenda that had an entire page for each day, and a text file to manage my time and task list. I was also having tons of fun while doing this. Ironically, I was more social this term than any of the 9 other terms. I was making some great friends in math who shared much of the same outlook on life and university as me.
7. Bought a new laptop, a Fujitsu Lifebook. May 6 2008. Perhaps the cheapest laptop I would ever buy. I spend an incredible amount of time in front of my laptop everyday so buying a new laptop for me is like buying a new house for some.
8. Pocket Guide — Wrote an incomplete pocket guide called Techniques of Problem Solving that collects almost all my thoughts on smart problem solving. I need to finish working on this soon.



9. IB Reunion. Photos here. Met some friends after 3 long years. Aug 23 '08. Some of the people in the photo below have made a huge difference in my life, so I'm glad I was able to make it to the reunion and meet them.

   

10. First real trip to the States — Orlando, Aug 27 '08. Pictures here, here, and here. I stayed at my cousin's place. It was on-the-whole a pretty fun trip. Loved the tropical-like weather the most.



11. Got hooked to House M.D. and Prison Break. I remember this one time in Aug when I ended up watching 7 episodes of each in one day. This completely obliterated my study time when I should've been studying for an open-book NE 343 final exam. Oh wells.

Fall 2008

12. Absolutely no studying in 3B — still managed an average of 70%. Actually very few people knew about this plan. I decided to take a 180 from Spring 2008 and see how far I'd get in school without studying even one bit. The idea was to see how much I could game the system. So all I did was attend lectures, that too only 50%-60% of them were actually attended, tutorials, labs, attempt assignments (first-pass only), and do the term projects. That's all. Actually it was really hard for me to not study the first one month because of old habits, so I ended up studying a bit the first 2-3 weeks. Soon enough, I was swamped with job interviews so I had no choice even if I wanted to study. But then, by mid-October, the profs made it really easy not to study the next 2 months. One of the profs was so bad we managed to kick him out and get him replaced. The material got so dry, I barely hit the books the whole term. Not even before the final exam. You can tell I wasn't getting much studying done during exams by looking at my delicious, digg, and facebook activity. So it turns out that the system, even at Waterloo, is very gameable: I managed a 70% by only knowing 30% of the material. Interestingly, I promised myself a leather key chain if I could pull this off. Guess what my key chain's made off today?
13. 25 job interviews in 3B. I always used to suck at phone interviews and telephone conversations, mostly because I had spent the first 18 years of my life never using the telephone all that much. But by the end of the job-search season, I was a master of phone interviews. So much that the employer I chose to work for had interviewed and selected me over the phone. This was a first time for me.
14. Found a job in a city I've always wanted to visit — San Francisco. I'm going to be working for Tagged Inc starting Jan '09. This will move me towards my goal of learning to build super high-traffic websites. I already have my employer as a friend on facebook. Good to see things are moving fast.
15. VeloCity and Sparknav. VeloCity is a UW technology "dormcubator" (portmanteau of dorm and incubator) residence that houses about 70 students a term. Our project Sparknav is a tour guide technology that provides directions and relevant content to smartphone users based on their location. Like a map of a shopping mall you're in on your cell phone. Or directions to the nearest washroom. Our team won (photos here) a $1000 award from Extreme Venture Partners for our project because they believed strongly in location-based technologies, especially mobile location-based technologies. I think location-based technologies have huge potential. Google Maps, GPS, cellular tower triangulation and wifi triangulation have barely scratched the surface. Info on other interesting VeloCity projects here.

    

16. Transition. Moved from Outlook to Google Calendar. View my calendar here. This is an important move since a calendar that is not available everywhere is no good.
17. FYDP. Got off to a good start on our engineering fourth-year design project. The project looks pretty interesting. It involves the deposition of titania (TiO₂) nanoparticles on membranes used for sea water desalination to allow the membrane to "self-clean" itself and get rid of accumulated organic contaminants. Check out our project proposal presentation. [PDF - 0.98 MB]
18. Campus rec — last time I got involved was in 1A for archery and taekwondo. Did core and 'on the ball' this time around. Attended all classes of core and skipped only one class of 'on the ball' due to a time conflict with a midterm. Had lots of fun in both classes. I'm thinking of doing actual Pilates next term. Somehow I think I'd find this more fun than doing yoga, but don't know why.
19. Got hooked to The Office. It was a natural move since it is obviously my kind of humour. I killed a lot of free time during exams watching 4-5 episodes a day. I also started watching Dexter from scratch, and I think I like it. I've only watched 10 episodes so far, so I can't say for sure, but it looks good.
20. Went Paperless. For the first time ever, I consciously decided to go as paperless as I could this term. The experiment worked out quite well. Almost all the paper I used was paper that was about to be recycled, stolen from the numerous recycle bins around campus. I blogged about my experience here. (More of a braindump than a blog really.)
21. Birthday Wishing Made Easier. Built a facebook app that mines birthdays from facebook and automatically wishes a chosen subset of your friends with a randomly chosen custom message set by you. More info here. Mostly built this app to learn the facebook API and its possibilities.
22. Even more increased Facebook and Twitter activity. But not addicted though. A friend of mine helped me create a fan page which at first I thought was a funny idea, but all of a sudden, I got people signing up to become fans and I was like woah, this is real. Sign up to receive once-a-month updates. Also, sometime in December, I switched to using the Facebook live feed instead of the traditional news feed. I've never looked back since. The benefits have outnumbered all of Obama's votes.
23. Email addiction. I got addicted to email sometime in Oct '08. I'm not sure that's a good thing. This term alone, I've either sent or received 2000 non-spam, non-notification messages. Some people have figured out that if they send me an email about something, it will likely get done. Others called me an email freak. Paul Buchheit, the founder of gmail, became my new hero.

The thing that took the icing was that I was able to stay vegetarian the entire 12 months. And that's in a city like Waterloo when I didn't know how to cook and when 99% of my friends were passionate carnivores. Some days I was so tempted to try something new because I was sick of the plaza. I ended up at Subway a lot of the time. So if you're a newbie vegetarian looking to eat healthy, look no further. I know at least 33 places in walking distance to the UW campus where you can get decent vegetarian food. The benefits of going vegetarian are (truthfully) outlined here.

I think at the end of the day, there was tons of learning done and lots of life-lessons gained. That's what matters most to me. I think I've made a difference in at least one person's life. That's good enough for me. Most of my time this year was spent quietly at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo but I had a few delectable sprinkles of Chennai, Vancouver, Guelph, Mississauga, Vaughan, and Orlando mixed in there. Of the 12 months, I can firmly say Jun-Aug '08 was perhaps the best period of the year, mostly because there is no one person except me that completely knows the kind of life I was living and the kind of things I was doing to keep calm and stay sane 24/7. It was tumultuous times for me.

Before we close the curtains, let us once again remind ourselves of Shakespeare's inspiring words like we did 4 years ago.

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms. And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress' eyebrow.

Wish me more luck! I can't seem to have enough.

-- Rajesh Kumar
31 December 2008