Thought Outflux | Anirudh Sanjeev

I went online today to try to find the oldest trace of myself on the internet. Following a brief, and rather unpleasant introduction somewhere in 2000, I came online again in 2005, and since 2006, most of the text I’ve written is hauntingly well archived and available on servers all across the world. But we’re not here to talk about disturbing privacy issues, but about how far back can you trace yourself.

First, let’s see how far we can go into 2000. I was 13 or something, and am really not proud of the things I wrote, said or did. But then again, I don’t approve of anything I said or did more than fifteen minutes ago.

I didn’t write anything on public domain websites, so that was out of the question. I was in the US utilizing an old, near throwaway PC with an 80mb hard drive. I remember some of the things I used to do with it, but it’s rather vague.

I had a yahoo id. I used to do stuff with it. I remember it had to do with my zip code then, but only I typed it in wrong. Instead of 94587, I kept it as 98547. I remember the ID was something like anirudh_2000_98547.

[update]A little searching later, I found it’s actually ani_2000_98547. You can see the results of the search here but the annoying thing is it’s not letting me find my password. I wrote a polite li’l email to the yahoo staff, and explained I haven’t logged in for seven years, and gave some details that might confirm that I’m me. But let’s see how that turned out.

Also, I remember I tried to build a website, but it was a ridiculous load of trash, mostly because I went to geocities and put a bajillion different oddities on the page, well, it was plain fu*ing ugly. This was mostly inspired by a classmate’s webspace, hosted on geocities, under the username, absolute_dictator. Well, the classmate in question, Shawn McDonald, went on to publish the content on his own domain name psycho-ward.org, ensuring he won’t have so much of a headache finding his archived data. Of course, it’s now parked, and he’s on the Agnoiologist.

But still, I’m no closer to finding the oldest archived information about me. The annoying thing is seaching for my name results in thousands of links to oneclick, rendering it useless.

Now, I guess it’s time to give up and head over to the newer ones. I remember I wrote on a blogspot.com subdomain weblog, but I deleted all the posts by accident, almost a year’s worth of them. And yes, it wasn’t called “insane ramblings of a lunatic madman†as all blogspot weblogs are called today, but was simply “Thought Outfluxâ€, and the articles from 2005 are now missing. I’ve got the occasional copy from here and there, so I was largely invisible before 2006. Most of my other traces have also disappeared.

Sigh, now I have five domain names, high end hosting and google tells me I’m the second most popular for my first name. Yet even google’s lost the cache data for my content, and it’s unsearchable.

It’s not about the internet. It’s about going back in time, and seeing figments of yourself, and comforting yourself in the fact that you’ve changed. Heck, just try reading your email from high school(rishi, you’re still in high school, but anyways) and you’ll smack yourself in the face, it’s about positive change, it’s about growth, it’s about evolution.

[update] I remembered I just once checked what usenet and newsgroups were about because outlook express supported them. After a little searching, an hour after my quest started, I found this: the oldest archived content from me, a question “do parallel universes exist?â€, and the answer “do you exist?â€.

The usenet signatures date it at february 3^h 2001, and in two days, it would be exactly seven years ago.

Every year, among several others, a student body from my institute holds a contest called “Mission Mars”. Essentially you write a little piece of code to behave like a little robot to explore the martian surface. Though this seems like much, it basically tells you what’s a few steps around you (the environment), and you have to decide where to move, and cover the maximum area within a finite time, making sure that the same regions aren’t covered over and over again, and the bots don’t collide into obstacles.

Essentially, you are given a small string, and you have to return another string, but it’s a lot more interesting than just that. But that’s not what I’m going to talk about. This post is going to be, as always, about: ME!! Yep, narcisstic ol’, nihilistic ol’, silly ol’ me.

More specifically, it’s about evolution in code. Essentially, while I submitted my code, which spanned nearly 3500 lines, I realized that gmail had archived a piece of code which I submitted for the same contest two years ago. When I opened it up, I had a similar reaction to what I do when I re-read some of my old emails, my large intestine has a strange desire to jump up and strangle my head for being such a clueless nicumpoop. But anyways.

Code then:

Code Now:

Overall, I’m proud of my behemoth code, no matter how it works (which it does quite well) but I just hope I look back at this post in three years and write a similar one.

Also a huge advantage is writing code on a widescreen, large monitor. It’s absolutely gorgeous, doesen’t hurt your eyes after fifteen minutes, and you can split the window and cross reference the code, and the best part is that you can actually use the f*king sidebars with the function names and references and still be able to read the code. Pure bliss.

Screengrab(click to enlarge):

I’m a huge fan of last.fm. For the uninitialized(), last.fm tracks all the music that you play, and will recommend new bands, and track stats and you can meet similar minded people. In other words, if you love music even a thousandth as much as I do, you’ll love last.fm

One great service they had was to play samples of most songs with a label’s participation. So you could try out what the song sounds like, before getting the CD or getting the song from elsewhere. This is similar to the iTunes service.

Now you can play the whole of any song, without purchasing the music. It’s a blessing in case you want to try out new stuff, and a subscription service that adds to the benifits by allowing unlimited plays.

In my opinion, last.fm is the last “good guy” internet service out there. While everyone else are spamming, scamming, and forcing their way into a crowded market idea, last.fm remains original, simple, creative, and free. That’s why I pay for last.fm service. Not because I have to, because I want to.

I hope that last.fm beats the crap out of the RIAA and itunes someday.

Also, check out my personalized radio station. one of the few caveats of a subscription:

I was reading this Psychology Today article, and I found it a very enlightening and interesting read. It’s about fear and how we fear obscure things more from our mindset when much more dangerous things exist all around us.

To me, fear is less of instinct, and more of a desire for change. When I fear a long term outcome of a habit or a pattern, I might tend to avoid that, or when I fear a hot stove, it’s a desire for change in the way that my hand should stay away from the stove.

The human mind is beautifuly adapted to judge things which are not our primary core instinct but more subtle and complex. For example, while most animals fear natural predators, we fear saying the wrong thing to a friend/relative and thus hurt the relationship, which just seems odd from an evolutionary point of view. We fear outcome of items which have no direct correlation to our immediate survival and well being. Yet we sometimes fail to fear what is important to be feared.

My opinions on why we fear wrong.

1. We let media tell us what to fear: A few days ago, you could go around without a care in the world, but now with reports of terrorism, hate crimes, shootings, and other incidents that happen in relatively isolated cases control how we live our daily lives. When one person is affected by a strange/new disease, everyone within a thousand kilometer radius starts panicking when they get a cold. Essentially, just a few people are hurt in a day in cases reported by the news, while thousands are hurt/killed by various other common causes.

2. We fear what is rare: I remember my little sister had issues with snakes a while back. Primarily influenced by Indian movies, which features the king cobra more often than other creature features, and the fact that they’re rare in my(or rather her) side of the ballpark. A person growing up around snakes would have the least fear of them, while someone who’s never seen it at all, is misinformed by wrong opinion might really get a shock.

3. We don’t fear what is common: You’re much much much more likely to be hit by a car than by a snake, but still we don’t really care.

4. Seperating risk from values: I remember seeing a south park episode (season 8 I think, good times with weapons) where the underlying message is that the parents ignore little boys violently playing with weapons, and rather forcibly pursue supressing a mild outbreak of sexuality. Often risks are tied up with values of the controlling authorities, and this is the fundamental reason why several practices and substances are banned, quoting safety as a criterion, while the associated values pose a far greater risk.

Please note that the statements are provided for sake of argument and do not represent my opinion. My opinion can be provided personally if solicited.

5. Fear itself: Let’s face it, fear is essentially an evolutionary characteristic designed to save your life. If you see a life threatening animal, device, etc, your instinct tells you to run in the opposite direction. Worry, paranoia, and complications built upon the structures of your own personal world aren’t fear and can be clearly and logically reasoned out.

To me, fear is not a feeling, it’s an answer. Fear tells you when something is wrong, or something has the potential to be wrong. Worry, anxiety, depression, etc do not share anything in common with it in my book. At the end, risk is only a number or a value made up in our head.

I’m just hoping our lovely giant brains don’t phase out fear completely and when faced with a mountain lion, we go

“Hey there kitty! oh crap! you’re a mountain lion!”
“What does a mountain lion do?”
“Hold on, let me check wikipedia.”
“Goddamn internet ads. I hope I get wi-fi inside a mountain lion’s stomach”

After watching a rammstein concert video with a few friends a while back, I almost rediscovered a band which I stopped listening to a few years ago, and seriously wondered why.

Essentially Rammstein is a german industrial metal band [Wikipedia], who’s famous for their simplistic, yet extremely catchy songs with a very heavy and powerful bassline and pounding drums. Their songs are perfect headbanging material, and the vocalist, Till Linderman has a rough, deep, ,and heavy bass voice, which is one of the most recognizable voices in music today (with competition perhaps only from lemmy).

Their music is great, with five albums, and the old ones being absolute classics. Also they put on perhaps the best show ever. While most concerts are mostly the band playing, rammstein’s lead singer is a pyrotechnician, and the show has flamethrowers, burning gimmicks, fireworks, and other things that go “fuyer frie”.

At the end, this is great stuff, and i’ll listen to this for a while before going back to amon amarth.

Also I got a new motherboard and processor(intel core2duo) and a 19” monitor. They’re mostly from the winnings of the WBT contest, and the monitor was a gift from my parents .

So I could run crysis on my rig. It chugged along on ultra low graphics with no anti aliasing. Crysis was a nice game, but tried to go overboard with the graphics, but was fun to play for a while. I started having the strange problem with motion sickness if I played for more than half an hour, but that prevents me from playing too much, if the game was good enough.

Bottomline, crysis looks nice, but is mind bogglingly difficult even on normal settings, and took lots of planning to execute properly, but was strangely satisfying. I didn’t find the game dynamics that impressive, though everyone seems to be talking about it. It also did a Halo2 on the ending, which was just a nasty kick in the cojones.