We deny it. We think the adjective frugal is a polished euphemism for cheap.
There is a difference.
Unfortunately, you have to be frugal first to understand the difference.

There are things you need and there are things you just want.
Desire is the magic currency that advertisers love to create out of thin air.
It’s one of the dark arts. (only half-joking)

Desire leads to consumption.
Consumption gives you an initial high, but it wears off sooner than you’d expect.
Just look back at any of your last few gadget buys – how long did the awesome last? :
A week?, 2 weeks?…

PROTIP : Seek out real lasting value, whenever you encounter the need to acquire something.
Used things often do the job just as well as brand new things.
NEW Cars are a notoriously terrible investment that come to mind.

PROTIP 2: When in doubt, invest in Experiences over ‘Stuff‘. Travelling to new places is always a good bet.

Being frugal doesn’t mean buying the cheapest item on sale.
Get the item that just does the job, without compromising on bare minimum quality requirements.
The real-world difference between that item and the fanciest brand is a single handful of percentage points.

Caveat: NEVER skimp on safety, especially when your loved ones are at stake.
Caveat 2: Don’t be a CHEAPBASTARD. Nobody likes you guys/girls either. :p

P.S: Being frugal in your 20′s makes you a ‘millionaire-next-door‘ sooner than your friends who partied through it.
Compound interest is sufficiently indistinguishable from magic to me, on most days.

We are all hormone addicts.
We just wait for the next secretion into our brains.
Repeat, ad infinitum.

Take the common man on the street.
Odds are, he follows one of the major religions of the world.
What do they all have in common?
They make you feel good.

Now take a Zen monk somewhere in Tibet.
He has essentially mastered the chemical systems of his brain.

End result: What we call ‘Happiness‘

Life is meant to be Lived.
That is the only meaning we will ever know while we are alive.

Each of us will have a unique experience of what we call Life.
I think that is the most beautiful thing ever.

Don’t ruin your experience with 1000+ year-old rules, that make no sense what-so-ever to modern man.
You are bound to get slaughtered like Sheep.

Now that we know that we are all high-seeking junkies, lets cut the crap.
Go forth and discover new thrills, chills, creeps, sadness and joy. Apathy is not an option.

In short, discover your personal flavour of Flow .
[relevant reading: Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience ]

Well, like many others out there, AI was a black hole for me during college.
It never managed to hold my attention despite my fascination with all things geeky/obscure/arcane.
Or maybe I was just really lazy to pay attention back in the day. AI qualifies as hard CS.

Anyway, this latest Stanford gift offers you the chance to learn at the feet of the AI master himself : Peter  Norvig,
That’s reason enough for me to click Signup and dust off my 2nd Edition of AIMA (Amazon, Flipkart)

Join me for some really hard CS-ey fun if you’re curious about theoretical CS and seek more than a wikipedia article’s worth of knowledge.

I found a list of Course prerequisites in a Reddit post .
You can get them at Khan Academy’s Youtube[1] channel[2] or if you’d prefer to have the videos offline as well, PirateBay has the cookies .

If you’re significantly smarter than yours truly, sign up for the ML-class too. (I’m giving this one a pass, this fall)

P.S: Hurry! Enrollment for the Fall 2011 class closes on October 10, 2011.

I stayed up all night.
Then plowed my way through the following day without napping.

And Voila! I now regularly sleep at 12-1 am or so and wake up at 7:30am like an atomic clock.

Its been steady so far for a few weeks now. I wanted to wait a bit before shouting it while running through the town square, figuratively speaking.
I can’t describe how glad i am, to feel the sun in my face and in my room, after months of a vampire-like life.

Coupled with late evening weightlifting-based workouts, i’ve banished my DSPS demons for good, this time.

So, for others out there struggling with Insomnia , DSPS , or other Circadian Rhythm interference without a medical reason, besides a late-night Internet/Tv addiction,

There is always HOPE .

Edit: This post has been lying in my drafts since September 2009.
I don’t even feel like counting the months; so i’m hitting publish now. :-/

Picture a big bald man all of 6’1″ and about 110kgs (a high quote to be on the safe side), hopping around in nothing but his boxers and a large half-eaten plantain banana in one hand. You now begin to understand why i find myself the subject of much hilarity.

I am a clown. I feel like i was born to make people smile. Some do. Some don’t.

Oh well, you can’t win em all.

wait, what was this post about…
Once again, i reveal my distracted side. Both of them.

All new posts get saved as drafts initially. Only when you’re ready and happy with the content+formatting do you have to choose the ‘Publish’ option. Sweet!
——————-
OK. Thats it… I got tired of editing this draft on a T9 keypad. Finishing this post on the regular WYSIWYG editor in WP 2.7.1 .
So much for mob-blogging/moblogging/whatever…

Hope this will give some new online ‘Ego’ to this formerly active twitterer. Blogging probably would make one a better thinker. It forces you to construct careful and sensible arguments and viewpoints, as opposed to the free for all (but mucho fun) chatter-fest that is Twitter.

But then, again… I’ve gone off-topic. AGAIN.

Yes, I knelt on my glasses(with my knee, mind you)
The disorientation is not exactly momentary. I was walking in a blurry daze through NH47 traffic. Hence, It took me twice as long to reach the office. Things haven’t exactly gone from bad to worse, but now I have to use my sizzzling hot laptop on my lap. ouch.
I really should’ve done something about those 70°C-plus CPU temperatures. Talk about getting burned in a warm place.

And so things roll on till it reaches critical trivial mass, where I can just shrug it off as another of my insignificant failures. I certainly dont seem to be learning anything from this particular exercise.

++
UPDATE: This post has been lying in my Drafts folder for over 20 days now. I’m kinda fed up with talking about what the next great thing is going to be. I’m already sounding like ole Bill Gates and his inane predictions. Wasn’t he the one who predicted that the future is in web apps? like 2 weeks ago?

*shakes head*

Well, back on topic; I am now gainfully employed by Logicmanse Solutions : a bootstrapped web development and consulting shop HQ’ed in Trivandrum, Kerala. (no, not in the TechnoPark; there’s nothing park-like about THAT place. I ought to call it technoZoo, with all its caged and tame beasts. :p)

As for the job description, I’d say I do just about anything just as long as its not the same thing I did 5 minutes ago. Any side-effects, you ask? A LOT less twittering and social media chatter from this slightly tamer geek.

Until the next time I feel like whining to the world,
Goodbye and happy hacking.
(hey, its my blog. I’ll print goddamned whatever I want.)

Observation 1: On the rare occassions that I go to bed on or before 11pm, like other human sheep-beings, I end up needing close to 9 hours of sleep to be satisfied.


Observation 2: Ditto for the episodes of sleeping between 2am and 4am. 9 hours seems to be my norm.


Obviously I’m not one of those freaks, who need just 5 hours of sleep to get by[no offense to said freaks].

But WAIT… there’s more.
Over the past 5 years, i’ve discovered that, its possible to hack/mod my circadian rhythms by sleeping later and later, and waking up MUCH later. My body seems to ignore ‘normal’ signals like, sunlight in my face and the birds chirping and screeching, that works on regular people. After weeks of this schedule, I was convinced I had a Vampire gene in me somewhere.

Sleeping from 9 to 5 when the world toils away is kinda cool in a creepy kind of way.
It gives the creeps to lots of friends when they realize that the world is asleep for the most part when my mind is most active. In the end, I decided to skip the Vampire meme and stick with ‘Geekus nocturnalis’.

All is well with the circadian world, until exam time approaches. Unfortunately, Kerala University is run by a bunch of boring ‘normal’ sheeple who work 9 to 5. Hence, the big spanner in my sleepworks. How do you write an exam, when your brain is just about ready to shut down, after a long night of uber-unProductive Internet surfing and trolling… It boggles the mind.

I finally had to put my foot down yesterday. Translation:By some miracle, I managed to doze off at 11pm. Then, slept lightly for 3 hours, wake at 2am; Then FORCE myself to dream about ‘brazilian hotties who are great cooks’ , and sleep another 2 hours. (I know, I must be getting old when I have to FORCE myself to do these mundane things) The short story is I’m awake and jumping much before dawn.
Things I’ve done since then: Took an hour-long stroll along the old-fashioned surroundings outside my lodge; walked past the village temple and marvelled at all the regulars who drop-by to make their peace with the maker at sunrise. This boggles the mind. But all in all, it was a pretty novel experience.

I wonder if I can keep this up untll my brain fails-over to my sun-safe defaults at noon. (<- notice the jargon overload; thats the sleep deprivation talking.)
No wonder…. I’m feeling sleepy already.

arghhh. FAIL.