Running on

Its been quite some time since I've updated this page. A lot has changed since the last post I made. The last entry was posted from the terrace of my lovely Chennai home. Quite a lot things have changed(quite fast) since then. I've moved a couple of timezones to the east and life is going pretty fine. I've always wanted to write detailed entries of what I'm up-to( you know....with life). But it turns out I'm a lousy(lazy too) writer. There is something that I realized during my feeble attempts to abstract my state of existence into a single blog post. There is always a song that does the job far better than I could have ever done. So here goes!!. The track is "Running on empty" by "Jackson Browne". Replace the 65 in the song with 2005 and 69 with 2009 and it fits ;)

Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels

Looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields

In sixty-five I was seventeen and running up one-on-one

I don't know where I'm running now, I'm just running on

Running on-running on empty

Running on-running blind

Running on-running into the sun

But I'm running behind

Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive

Trying not to confuse it with what you do to survive

In sixty-nine I was twenty-one and I called the road my own

I don't know when that road turned into the road I'm on

Running on-running on empty

Running on-running blind

Running on-running into the sun

But I'm running behind

Everyone I know, everywhere I go

People need some reason to believe

I don't know about anyone but me

If it takes all night, that'll be all right

If I can get you to smile before I leave

Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels

I don't know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels

I look around for the friends that I used to turn to to pull me through

Looking into their eyes I see them running too

Running on-running on empty

Running on-running blind

Running on-running into the sun

But I'm running behind

Honey you really tempt me

You know the way you look so kind

I'd love to stick around but I'm running behind

You know I don't even know what I'm hoping to find

Running into the sun but I'm running behind

No ceiling

Comes the morning
When I can feel
That there's nothing left to be concealed
Moving on a scene surreal
No, my heart will never
Will never be far from here

Sure as I am breathing
Sure as I'm sad
I'll keep this wisdom in my flesh
I leave here believing more than I had
And there's a reason I'll be
A reason I'll be back

~ No ceiling by Eddie Vedder from Into the Wild OST

Lost in the wild

I've always had a thing for big open spaces. And since now my means to connect to the world wide web is wire free for the most part, I go online from my terrace. I'm writing this blogpost sitting in the dark, under the stars. The pic above was taken using my laptop's webcam right around sunset. I look a tad happy in that pic(that is something considering the fact that i make a consious effort of to not smile for the camera)... might be the open spaces thing. I'm home alone for half a week. When you are caught in a scenario like that you keep thinking more about yourself and there are fewer distractions to your thought process. I wonder thats why whether all these sanyasis take a hike into the wilderness alone to fulfill their spiritual journeys. Talking about spiritual matters, sitting on a terrace watching the stars is probably the only spiritual thing that I can connect to. There are no gods to pray to, no rituals to do, no stuff to eat, you are just there in that moment. I look around me and I notice one thing, Chennai is very different from trivandrum in the fact that it has a busier airspace. Theres atleast one airplane in the horizon in any minute. But I cant hear them, so they just seem to blend into the landscape. They can be a distraction though, especially when your looking out for stars its like, "Hey what is that kinda bright star near the eastern horizon...must be a planet...it must be saturn...holy shit its moving..what if its a UFO...nah its just a plane". Sometime in the future I intend to take a "Into the Wild" like trip(only I plan to return alive). There is something about going away to far off places alone. I dont know why I'm attracted to the idea, maybe its escapism. Only one way to find out though ;) I just hope I have the courage to decide to do what is necessary, since I've never been much of a "courageous person"

Talking batteries

This post comes out of my necessity to preserve the battery life of my shiny new lenovo. I've heard that the key to preserving battery backup is to make sure you use your battery as much as you can and depend on AC power just to charge your battery. Since i don't run a full-fledged DE like GNOME or KDE there are no notification systems I could leverage to monitor my battery status.

Up until now I had to manually run "acpi" once in a while to check my battery status and take necessary action, and this process was a real pain in the ass especially when you are watching a movie and don't want to be disturbed. Thats why i decided to cough up a little script that would keep monitoring my battery status and "tell me"(literally) when either battery is low or battery has been fully charged.

Prerequisites

• Festival text to speech system: Festival can read out text from stdout and hence is really handy. In Ubuntu/Debian-like systems you can run the following command to install festival.

sudo apt-get install festival

• A small problem with the default installation of festival is that festival by default uses the outdated /dev/dsp to access your sound hardware. Hence festival cant say anything if you are using another application that has sound like mplayer for instance. To fix this you need to get festival to use ALSA. To do that run the following command from terminal.

printf ";use ALSA\n(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)\n(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command \"aplay -q -c 1 -t raw -f s16 -r \$SR \$FILE\")\n" > ~/.festivalrc

Now download the following file and extract its content(battmon.sh) into your home directory

http://sites.google.com/site/r4jivn4ir/Home/battmon.tar.gz

Make the script executable by running

chmod +x battmon.sh

Now you need to setup this script to run during login. To accomplish that add the following line to the end of the file .xprofile which is present in your home directory. If such a file is not present create it.

./battmoh.sh &

From the next time you login, this script will keep checking your battery status and "tell you" whether you need to charge your battery or unplug your charger. Do test and let me know if it works :-)