Farmer in the Dell

The farmer in the Dell

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4ndeZMorUI&feature=related

Did you ever see one of those offbeat movies that are supposedly about the human experience in the modern world ? No ? Well, then, come take a look at my life this past week. It all started when I decided that I was going to get the very best laptop I could afford with the 2000 dollars enrichment allowance that my university offered me. They naively assumed that having a laptop at home would allow me to do more productive work. And I naively, for my part, thought that I could fool them and pretty much do my own thing with my laptop. And so I wisely brought the latest operating system - windows vista home premium ( I request that you wait for my cue to groan. This is not the time to groan). And I decided I was going to get the longest warranty I could afford.


A Dell Inspiron 1525
Windows Vista Premium
huge ram, lots of hard disc, a supposedly kick-ass intel processor and so on and so-fatefully-forth


The farmer in the dell
The farmer in the dell
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The farmer in the dell



After all, I had heard horror stories about how the US sorely lacked computer service centers down the road that could solve your problems for pittance by fixing you up with pirated parts. If I ever get to be St Peter even for a day, I'd pave a gilded road from those computer service centers to heaven.And I got myself a big laptop screen. No tablet PC's for me. I foresaw that a good chunk of my day would be spent toiling away in front of the laptop, working steadily to rid myself of any natural experience (it's all digital) and so I figured I'd get the best. And then of course, when I got here, I had to get wireless internet. It wouldn't do for me to sit glued in one place in my apartment. I needed the flexibility of sometimes sitting on the chair, and sometimes sitting on my bed, sometimes near the dresser, sometimes in the kitchen, where I slaved to heat up ready-made rotis. I needed the mobility. At that time it felt like it was going to be my only luxury. And so we had a netgear router hooked up, and I christened the network rather geekily as "dendro" (dendrites for neurons and me being neuroscientist, and dendrites being latin for branches and trees, although ever come across a tree trying to get nutrition from the earth without physically spreading their roots ? you see humans are by far the dumbest of evolution's products, it follows from their dumbness that they think they're the smartest).


The farmer takes a wife
The farmer takes a wife
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The farmer takes a wife

And then I started going to the lab in my spare time and earning some "chillar". Here's where I started getting used to the next luxury. We have 2 screens in each of our labs. Its convenient if you want to read a paper on one screen and have the figures on another screen. It's convenient when you have your program on one screen and are debugging on the other screen. It's convenient when you want to monitor your experiments on one screen while you're lazily surfing the net on the other screen. I can find new uses for my 2 screen system pretty much everyday and its no surprise that I wanted to mirror this set-up at home. I convinced myself of course, that it would in fact allow me to do more work at home. What I really wanted was to watch netflix movies on a larger screen. My devious mind decided that I could watch a movie on the big screen and use the laptop screen to make data presentations and perform data analysis (when the situation demanded it). And I decided that in order to fulfill my dream of a fuller, richer more enriching life, I needed a bigger screen.

Enter the samsung syncmaster 20 inch uber (un)necessity.


The wife takes a child
The wife takes a child
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The wife takes a child

< I've never been a parent myself. Now I am an adult. And I am filled with the realization and amazement that my parents have consistently been able to find a sense of optimism, a bright cheery spirit that made it possible for them to more than just put up with me- to actually love me. Otherwise, their fate, like mine and my syncmaster, would've been all downhill from there>

And to make space for this fairly large screen, I had to rearrange a lot of things on my tiny ikea desk (this is a relic from the time I believed I could live within reasonable means). I am now looking for a larger desk that will accomodate my screen, my laptop, my second hand, dented, but decent sounding (well decent enough for youtube) altec lansing speakers, and extra space for odd things such as empty coffee cups, plates, spoons and other assorted items.A table large enough so you can see everything without having to stumble over everything and risk breaking something expensive. For now, since its summer, my heater doubles up as a makeshift table. It has a daily planner that I never use, a CD from the library on which I am running late fees and kleenex tissues (just coz.).


The child takes a nurse
The child takes a nurse
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The child takes a nurse


At this point, it isn't enough for me to watch a movie from pretty much any site. It's gotta be HD. Because bad resolution looks really bad on my syncmaster. I needed to milk the internet and the screen for all their worth.

The nurse takes a cow
The nurse takes a cow
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The nurse takes a cow


And it is at this point I start noticing that I have never really had great internet speed. And while I've been demystifying many people from back home in India that internet out here isn't all that is cracked up to be, I couldnt kid myself no more. And I decided I needed to fix this. My friend asked me one fine day why netflix was buffering. What did he mean, why was netflix buffering. Netflix always buffers. He says no. I say no ?. He says no! never. I say not ever?. He says never ever. He quickly introduces me to one of those speedometer sites where you can see your speed and I found out to my chagrin that I was getting prehistoric speeds. And I started watching that meter as if my life depended on it. Waiting. Waiting and panting. Waiting and panting and hoping to see that arrow move to the 1 MB zone.

The cow takes a dog
The cow takes a dog
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The cow takes a dog


I call Dell. They tell me, in retrospect, almost mockingly that my warranty is valid till 2011. And they put me to a special department dedicated to solving wireless connectivity issues. It's never a good thing to know they have a whole department for your problem. On the one hand it means they have expertise on the issue at hand. On the other hand its clear they haven't gotten around to solving the problem, otherwise, in these trying, cost cutting days, those departments would've vanished, those jobs would've gone and would be doing their due part in adding to the unemployment rate. See what I mean about being optimistic about your kid ? The kind lady at Dell immediately starts sharing my screen and messing around with the settings and disables something and enables something else (hey, I wasn't passively watching, I took an active role in solving the problem as will become apparent in a bit). And bam, the arrow goes to the right and shows me more than 2 MBps. Am I happy with her service ? Hell Yeah. And 2 days later, the speed drops again. Now I am not just annoyed and vexated, I am incredibly curious about what's going on.

The dog takes a cat
The dog takes a cat
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The dog takes a cat

And I call Dell again. She updates something else. Changes something else. Meanwhile, I am honing my googling skills about what this problem can be. It could be with the router apparently. So I reset the router.Is my router at eye level or on the floor ? Is it far away. How many computers use this network. Have you rounded pi to a gazillion decimal points or a gazillionplex decimal points. And I start doing what every true scientist does. Change one variable, keep other variables constant. Test. Change one variable, keep other variables constant. Test. In order to keep living, I added a fine point to this schematic. Change one variable, keep other variables constant. Test. Breathe! Change one variable. Keep other variables constant. Test. Breeaaaaaaaaathe!


The cat takes a rat
The cat takes a rat
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The cat takes a rat

And so through sheer paranoia, I narrowed it down to this.
If I connect my laptop to the external monitor, my speed drops.

My googling shows that it tends to happen when you use DVI cables. But I use VGA cables. The problem seems to have disappeared for them if they changed the router channel. Changing router channel has no effect on my internet speeds.

Yay! Source of problem detected!!!!

The rat takes the cheese
The rat takes the cheese
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The rat takes the cheese

And so, quite sadly, I had to decide to send away my big screen. What would really work for me is a nice, big, optiplex desktop monitor, with a huge box sized CPU and an ethernet port. And if I want mobility, I'll just a really long extension box. I'll get one a mile long. And I wheel my ikea desk wherever I want to go. It's nice, dependant, and wonderfully elegant.



The rat takes the cheese
The rat takes the cheese
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The rat takes the cheese



******************

Epilogue:

I recently found that if I keep the router on the ground, if I plug my laptop to the external monitor without shutting the lid of my laptop, my internet speeds go back to normal. I don't understand it.


But...


The farmer in the dell
The farmer in the dell
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The farmer in the dell

And then there was none

I think I have enough evidence against the idea that all life on planet earth is based on ribonucleic acids (DNA, RNA). Before I go down this very heretical path, I must define "life" in as vague a way as possible. To me, a life-form is any being that selfishly schemes against other life-forms so that it, in turn, can either prolong its life, or reproduce and have the re-product ( I think that's a more sensible word than offspring) prolong its life and so on and so forth. Obviously, in order to win my argument, I will insist on doing away with all flak that does not fit in with my theory. In that very noble spirit, I am doing away with the condition that my specimens reproduce. All I will show is that they are able to rather ingeniously prolong their life( definition of ingenuity: noun, that which I cannot explain, despite an abundance of free time.) And that, I hope, will force you to at least wonder, if not accept, that there may be the smallest, tiniest smidgeon of possibility in my grand theory.

Back in kindergarten and primary school, we always used to use pencils. Nice sharpened natraj pencils that your mom would sharpen religiously for you every night before packing up your bag. I cannot remember if I appreciated then, the almost-ballerina like twirling of the shavings coming out of the sharpener. I hope I did, because these days, with the high-tech BiC pencils, the magic has vanished. The closest I get to the swan-lakissmo shavings performance is when I sharpen my eye liner pencil. And that is nowhere near a lead-led elegance. And everyday after school, I'd come back home not just with blunt pencils (as one would expect according to the law of conservation of mass - since lead transferred to paper does not beget more lead on the pencil tip) but I'd come back home with missing pencils. Clearly, that is a violation of the law of conservation of mass. My pencils didn't disappear. They were lost. Misplaced. Left somewhere in school. Now why I never managed to lose erasers or sharpeners or rulers I do not understand. It was always the pencils that I lost. And this is not just a condition I found myself in. All my classmates frequently lost pencils. Of course, the story didn't stop when all of us progressed from boring led and wood pencils to fancy pen-pencils. The kind with thin leads that never needed sharpening. The kind you could click at the back and have a rather endless supply of a writing tip. And of course we lost those too. Which is why we always carried a spare in our pencil box. And then we graduated to pens. Because it has been eternally and silly-ly believed that we were of the age where we could completely form a coherent thought in our head and commit it to paper without needing to erase till the paper tore. And that's when our grades started dropping. Oh not because we entered adolescence and were preoccupied with fancying our classmates or spiting our rivals or feuding our parents. Because we couldn't make reversible mistakes anymore. Nonetheless, enter ink pins, ball point pens, parker pens, imitation parker pens, pens that our cricket stars use to sign autographs, pens that our film stars use to sign autographs, pens that would last till the end of our exams, pens that wouldn't blotch our lakme-winter-care-lotion-moisturized arms, pens with fragrance in them, pens that had 2 colour refills in them, pens with caps, pens with retractable tips, see-through pens, solid pens, really bad pens that are kept next to the telephone in case someone important should call and leave a message (so you could then proceed not to take the message because the pen wouldn't work), pens that you take to class with you, pens that you could gift your father (who will not use it because he too loses his pens all the time and will therefore only use the cheap stuff)and the flood of pens goes on. My point again is every single one of them gets lost.

When I really need a pen, I pretty much never find one. I can vividly remember seeing many, many pens and pencils in my bag. But when I do need one and reach out for them, they're never there, or they have strangely ceased working. It feels as if the world's scattered with pens everywhere, yet when I want them they're hardly ever there. Each time I clean my room, I can find pens under my bed, my desk, hiding in my closet, lying on the dressing table, and I faithfully put them in a pen holder, vowing to myself that I will never ever lose them again. And then something happens. When I'm on a call, and someone asks me to note something down, I can only obtain pens that don't work or pencils with no lead. And this has happened enough number of times that I am going to vehemently reject the theory that theyt just happen to be one of those things with a tendency to get misplaced.

I think they are one of those things with a tendency to scheme and plot against humanity and go into hiding. I now come back to what I will redefine as a pen's life. The longer it can keep its ink, the more successful a being it is. And the one that has the least ink is therefore the most expendable. So when a few pens congregate with each other, they single out the fella with the least ink in him and use him as a decoy. Which is why when you reach into your bag, the few cases where you do find a pen, it turns out that it won't write. You see, the pens have figured out that we ain't so dumb after all. And so they thought to themselves " if we make it look like we're always around, then the humans won't doubt us". And so they have their already wounded and battered soldiers (aka pens that have clearly used up their life supply of ink) to stand around in the world, offering themselves up for sacrifice so that the younger, more vital ones can survive. It is so brilliant a ploy that I am forced to believe that they live and breathe (or do the pen equivalent of breathe) and think and drink and make merry.

One of these days, these guys are going to figure out how to reproduce.

Don't you dare scoff at me. One of these days, these chaps will rewrite history ( all pen intended!)