Of the Binary Family

I just came back from a wedding. I also happen to have a Digital Logic paper tomorrow.

First, lets talk a bit about Digital Logic (God knows I can use the revision)

Digital Logic is basically making finite decisions in the form of a 1 or a 0. Using multiplication, addition, comparison, and inversion you take one or more inputs and spit out an output.

But that’s not important right now.

Weddings are a great place to find out the weirdness of the bride/grooms family. In this case, the wedding was a family one. (Not my cousin’s that’s still a week away) You find out all sorts of stuff. Like who hates who, what a certain person is called behind his/her back. etc.

Anyone one of you who have old relatives will be aware of the obsession people had with nicknames.

• You’ll have an 60-year-old vast entity of an uncle who every one calls “Munnu”
• A grandma-ish person who stares at the face of death every day called “Pinky”
• A thin-as-a-rail uncle who everyone calls “goolu-mian”

You get the point? Now at this wedding I met the kids of a certain uncle of mine called “No-no”.

Now, me, I’m desperate to score an A in Digital Logic no matter what. So, I’ve been studying the subject like crazy. And as soon as I heard “no-no” my brain went into overdrive. I grabbed the nearest person (of my age group) I could find and after explaining the concept of digital logic to him pitched my theory of what No No’s family tree would be like.

Since he’s “No-No” and not “No-No-No” that means he as 3 siblings. 2^2 = 4  vs  2^3 = 8

His brothers and sisters would be named; Yes-No, No-Yes and Yes-Yes, . He’s the eldest of the siblings. Not to mention they should be thankful that they are only 4 siblings and not 8, because if they were 8 siblings these would be some of the conversations their family might end up facing.

Mommy (introducing her kids to some relative) : … and this is  Yes-No-No, he’s in class 6. Finally this is Yes-No-Yes, she just started kindergarten.

Stranger:  Wait, who was Yes-Yes-No?

Mommy (patting husband’s arm) Yes-Yes-No’s not here yet. Maybe next year.

~~!~~

Daddy: NO-NO-YES!! Bring back my slippers! How many times I’ve got to tell you not to tame my slippers.

No-No-Yes: Abbu! No-Yes-Yes took them! You always blame me!

~~!~~

Teacher (accepting project proposals): Yes…No…No…

Yes-No-No: Yes Miss, you called me?

Teacher: No! I wasn’t. …Yes…No…Yes

Yes-No-Yes: Yes Miss?

(both are twins)

~~!~~

So that’s how I see my family. Thankfully the guy I had grabbed just stared at me and then smiled politely. There could be worse things he could be named No-No-No-Yes, with an entire cricket team backing him up to beat the hell out of me. I doubt he would then let me explain the concept of Hexadecimal to him.

Of Con-Men and Kurosagi

In this world, there are three types of swindlers…

Those who defraud other people out of their money….

 

Those who deceive others by manipulating their feelings….

 

 

And then, using these two as his only source of food…

 

…is the ultimate swindler in history…

 

…a swindler of swindlers…

A year ago, I saw an 11 episode series about swindlers. Kurosagi. It’s one of those awesome shows that keeps you guessing what will happen till the last moment. Old school plot progression that fleshed out the main characters each episode all the while juggling new ways to evade the good guys, and bringing the smack down on the bad guys. Not to mention the soundtrack was amazing

 

(I’m a sucker for good stories and soundtracks)

 

So naturally, after watching Kurosagi, I became a bit more educated in the various conspiracies around me that wanted to cheat me out of my money. Some investment people came to work (yeah this story is that old) and wanted us to invest in their organization and recruit other members to invest too. Basically a pyramid scheme.

 

Fortunately I saw an episode of Kurosagi where this exact scam took place. I remember yelling Sagi! and walking out of the auditorium (which in hindsight is what probably bought me into the sights of the upper management as an employee they could do without)

 

By the way, Sagishi is a swindler or a scammer. Sagi hence is scam (Ataka, correct me if I’m wrong).

 

The reason I remembered this is because I nearly got scammed twice today. In the span of one hour.

Would Be Scam #1

I was at Corporative Market looking to buy a framed slate with Quranic Letterings on it. Loh-e-Quran if you want to be really technical about it. Mum forced me to go buy it since a family friend living abroad wants two.

So I found a sober, decent looking one at a roadside stall at an intersection. The owner was a springy elderly gentleman. I asked him if he had another one in stock. Now the slate cost 300/- and I had a 1000 rupee bill. So, he asked me to give him the money and he’ll go get me my second slate. While he was doing that, he asked me to sit by the stall and keep an eye. Wore his jacket and went.

 

I sat there like an idiot for a few minutes, and suddenly I feel the urge to hum “Daite Daite Senorita” . . . which I remembered happens to be the theme for Kurosagi. My mind started to work in overdrive with turbo-boost.

• The guy asked me for money before delivering the goods.
• He didn’t let me follow him.
• He wore his jacket and went (it was quite warm at the time)
• He slipped away without telling any of his neighbouring roadside stalls to take care of his stall.

Now for the next 15 minutes I was freaking out. I half expected the real owner to walk up to the stall and ask me why I was sitting there. I even contemplated taking that one slate and making a run for it, but the tailor from the nearby shop was staring at me (which further reinforced my being scammed theory)

 

Finally the old dude came back. With another slightly different slate. Honestly if our craftsmen had their way they’d cover every single picture of the Kaa’ba with glitter and mirrors (forgive my blasphemy but if you saw the Loh-e-Qurans I saw, you’d be saying the same thing.)

 

In short I didn’t get scammed, but the possibility existed in spades. Also note, if you ever go to buy Loh-e-Quran there are two variations. A 15 block one and a 9 block one. Who knew?

 

Would Be Scam #2

 

Finally with one slate in hand, I was heading home. The problem with being poor is you have to depend on buses to get you places. Buses also have a habit of being late or at times unreliable. So I went asking every Taimur, Dilawar and Hamza where I could catch Z-2 from.

 

I was in the middle of asking my 13th Dilawar when a Hamza rudely interrupted me asking me how weak my eyesight was. (I hate being a Leo – fucking curious as a cat)

 

I answered, which probably in Hamza land… (btw these names are a stretched out play on Tom Dick and Harry in case it escaped your mind) …meant lets start with an “OMG True Story” type routine.

 

He has a son, who had a –6 when it came to his vision. And you wouldn’t believe it, after a full herbal treatment he was back to 20/20. Hamza then told me about these herbs I was supposed to get from some guy from some shop. Sounded interesting but the herbs he told me about went over my head. So, I ended up following him through an alley to this guy’s herbal medicine shop. Hey, atleast I was cautious enough to firmly grip the 8 inch long micro-Phillips head screwdriver I bought moments ago, ready to take an eye or something if he started to undo his zarban.

 

Shady medicine shop. Hamza asked Taimur #14 to get a bottle of 60 rupee herbal paste. Sealed and it even had a hologram on it. wooo! Since I seemed interested, Hamza got Taimur #14 to add the necessary herbs in to the sealed bottle after breaking the seal. About one and a half tablespoon of something that looked like white pepper went into the paste, and roughly the same amount of powdered ginger. Hamza ‘authenticated’ the herbs by dabbing his pinky in the powder and rubbing it on his gingivitis infested gums. How drug-dealer-ish innit? 

 

Apparently these powders were given out in doses costing 30-70 bucks per dose. Guess how many doses in a tablespoon? 11 freaking doses. Taimur #14 was busy mixing what looked like flour (what is it with powdered herbs and white? Where is the shocking pink herb or the sparkly diamond dust)

 

Hamza, now running at full steam, was busy mixing the “medicine” and telling me how I’ll be throwing my glasses away in a month’s time. He took a butter knife from somewhere and scooped some of that slimy green goo and told me this was the required dosage.

 

Just then, totally grossed out by the paste, I looked at the receipt book Taimur #14 was filling out. The paste and three powders were currently at 580 or so. I faked a coughing fit and headed out the door for some “fresh air” I heard Hamza tell Taimur #14 to add the anti coughing herb (which I’m guessing would be Plaster of Paris.) Still ‘coughing’ and with Hamza following me, I quickly walked out the alley.

 

 

 #1 is where I found Hamza. #2 is Taimur#14’s shop. Blue is my escape path trying to lose Hamza. #3 is where I finally stopped (it is, in fact, the next road) I didn’t double-back intentionally, I got disoriented. –_–  

Of Tik-Tok

Til we see the sunlight…

…Tick tock, on the clock…

…But the party don’t stop…

…Woah-oh oh oh…

…Woah-oh oh oh…

NO WAY!

Tom-foolery aside. this has got to be one of the most awesome posts I’ll ever do in a while.

Second semester at uni came with a course called Digital Logic. We learnt about pre-computer generation parts. Gigantic chips that when combined in the right order would tell you if your answer matches with the answer key, or you could even make a calculator that only adds numbers together and gives you a sum. Such stuff.

Each course this semester required us to make a project for it. For logic people made counters, traffic lights, alarms, and other basic shit.

I proposed I’d make a clock. A decent AM/PM clock. With an alarm. Since I reasoned, that once these people made their useless counters and alarms, few would have to foresight to integrate it into their everyday lives. Hence I told the prof I’ll make a clock.

I had no idea the shit I got myself in.

(Below this line things might get technical, still I’ll try and keep them simple for most of you)

• The 555 circuit I made to drive the clock’s seconds kept speeding up for some unknown reason. so in 5 minutes it would be counting 30 seconds for every real second. in ten minutes the minute display would turn into the new second display.


• The 7490 and 7492s I used to count the seconds, minutes and hours were retarded. Theoretically one poke means one count. They would either ignore a poke or count it as 5 like there was some sort of animosity between them and the 555.


• No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the hours to move. even though I made simple double-delay poke thingy that would reset the hours from 12 to 1 instead of the normal zero.


• Since the hours weren’t resetting I couldn’t toggle the AM/PM light, which worked beautifully.


• And various glitches involving AND gates, negative feedback and god knows what else.

Why is it that whenever I try to make something it has a ton of glitches. So, after a long talk with a friend of mine, I went back to the book I tracked specifically for this purpose (TTL Cookbook by Robert Lancaster) Due to desperation and a looming deadline I ended up changing a few things at the last moment. I’m noting going to even go into the design phase.

Sheet #2	Sheet #1
Sheet #4	Sheet #3

Sheet One. Crystal Oscillator vibrates, goes through dividers, gives 1Hz pulses. 74160s count seconds and minutes. 7493s are easy to reset.

Sheet Two. Soon as the hours turn 13, it switches back to zero in an instant. The pulse that resets the clock also gets delayed and hits the count pin of the 7493 advancing it to 1. So in a fraction of a second, 12:59:59 turns to 0:00:00 to 1:00:00. I connected the reset clock pulse to the clock-pin of the edge triggered flip-flop which toggles AM/PM lights.

Sheet 3 is just the alarm logic. Each 10’s of Hours, Hour, 10’s of Minutes, and Minute is basically a Binary Coded Decimal (BCD – No I’m not making this up) The purpose of the circuit on this sheet is to check if a certain pattern is present and to eliminate the possibilities of it finding other patterns, When all 4 patterns match…

Sheet 4. A pull-up resistor (or a transistor) will power the two 555s in tandem create a two tone frequency that is used as an alarm.

Overall, it took me a day to fix all my problems and get it to work on breadboards.

Yeah, 8 breadboards, and I still need to wire the alarm logic. Feel free to question my sanity.

Oh, and it got the first prize in the Second Semester Hardware Contest. Wooo!

Of Being an Asshole on Bakra-Eid

I’m really happy today. I’m happy because I’ve started to write again after such a long time. And I'm writing because I’m happy. I. happy cause I got to talk to Hime.

HIME!! <3

It’s not like I didn’t have anything to write about over the last few months. I had a ton of opinions I wanted to pollute the web with, I just didn’t feel like writing.

I’m so freaking tired most of the time that I don’t even want to type anything. I have a few dozen letters I want to write to a friend of mine, but I can’t even bring myself to do that. Second Semester has been so shitty you have no idea.

• I hate Bakra-Eid.
• I hate the smell of poop that fills the air.
• I hate how people leave their cow/goat feces on footpaths and you have to walk really really carefully.
• I hate how those stupid mindless animals keep bleating over and over again in the middle of the night (I’m trying to sleep for fuck’s sake.)
• I hate how Eid Namaz is followed by a priest praying for the entire freaking world, one person at a time, can’t he group humanity and offer one prayer for everyone?
• I hate how the feces on the sidewalk are replaced by blood on the first day of Eid.
• I hate how you don’t get any money on this Eid

All in all I hate Bakra Eid.

So, three days ago, I was walking around my neighborhood trying to do any last-minute shopping. Considering the amount of homework I’d been given to complete during this 5-day long Eid Break, I was in a really bad mood.

I saw a cow. . .

Well, not this particular cow, but I saw one, surrounded by little kids oooh-ing and aahhh-ing over it’s majestic (lazy, smelly) self. Petting left and right, photo-op sessions, you name it.

Feigning interest, I went over to the kids. I asked the youngest one, as sweetly as I could, to tell me the name of said cow.

“Raju” came the meek reply.

“Raju? That’s quite fitting! Look at that majestic beast! Did you name him that yourself?”

“Brother did” said the boy.

“Can I pet him?”

“Sure!” chanted the kids, obviously happy that I was taking an interest in their cow. They even showed me how to pet him

I looked deep into Raju’s big black eyes, and in loud yet gentle voice (so that the kids could hear me) I spoke to him with soothing words:

“Raju, tomorrow a man will come, and he will slit your throat, you will bleed. If you’re lucky you might be able to kick him and walk a few feet with your head dangling by a few inches of flesh. You might even vomit once your throat gets severed. Next year they’ll bring a relative of yours and kill him too….”

I made two kids from the group cry. The rest were looking at me in horror.

I love being me. :D

Conspiracies Galore.

Yesterday’s Air Blue Crash is a tragedy. Lets move on now. No? Why?

This is where our media fails to be a valuable source of information. 152 people died in a plane crash. So now every news channel is going to milk it for all it’s worth. Geo is going to air a clip of an animated plane slamming into a mountain with a fountain of blood instead of explosion and the text “Air Blue: BOOM” slowly appears as the cartoony blood drips away. Samaa TV is going to steal the same clip, blur out Geo TV’s logo and show it, on loop.

The poor old retired PIA pilot is being blamed for the crash. The black box is missing. And everything is being done to make it sound juicy.

So let me get this straight. If I want my death to be broadcasted on national television for three days non-stop (with those cool Geo animations) I have to cough up 12k, and die in a spectacular explosion in some remote area of the country. No popularity for me if I turn out to be a victim of a suicide bombing or a massive car crash or even a railroad accident.

So, while watching the news for the umpteenth time, mum uttered something so mind blowing that I just had to blog about it.

She said: “This is all a conspiracy. The Americans are behind it. Guess why?”

* Blank Look *

Mum: “The Wright Brothers were American right? Had they not discovered aerodynamics, this plane crash would have never happened.

Makes you think doesn't it? It just proves everything right. World Trade Center, and now this.

American Conspiracies.

Of A Delayed Revival and Loads of D.I.Y.

Man. Vacations sure stink, but I’m not going to whine about it here. Sorry. I took a page out of an idiot’s book and made a seperate blog to whine on. Spent the last few days filling it up with rants and whining that would make me look like a little senile bitch.

True, some “well wishers” (saber – I’m lookin’ atcha) will try to find said blog. Sadly, I have decided to keep my whiny miserable-as-fuck life separate from the Spud-tastic orgy that is this blog.

So, recently I was talking to a friend and we came to the conclusion that depression causes people to act out in the weirdest ways possible. For me it’s turned out to be picking random fights with people, and long walks to areas I’ve never visited before. So, if I don’t post for ummm like a month – no more like six months to a year, assume I’ve been “accidentally run over” by a bus or something.

Ah 4Chan’s been there for me all the time. Sadly however, PTCL’s fucked up static IP system has caused me to end up with a perma-banned IP. Not to mention they won’t unlock any proxy sites. You google the word proxy and all you get is access restricted. BITCHES. I was never a lurker and I don’t wanna be one now!

Still. Rather than make you worry or give you jollies (yes kiddies, lookin’ atcha) I won’t announce my plans to end my life anytime soon. Hey, I just spent a fortune buying power-tools and I ain’t gonna kick the bucket before I make some use of them

Speaking of which, my room’s lacking elevated working surfaces. So far I’ve got a desk (littered with anime, CD towers, this laptop, and loads of paper), a full size single bed (used for studying and sleeping and storing things temporarily while working on them – they’re then shifted to the floorspace around the bed) one “mini” bed sans mattress (stores writing paper, origami paper, books, and anything that would stab me through the foot should I leave it on the ground) 

…

Yes, my room’s always a chaotic mess. Good thing no one visits me. :)

…

So yeah, elevated work surfaces. Obviously, make one needs a workbench. So, since I had a 2’x4’ piece of MDF I decided to make a table. Yes, this is me showing off my carpentry skills.

Buy me a nice cellphone someone? I’ll make furniture for you?

Of The Electronics Paper

Dear old Sir Munaf.

Mid semester he gave our batch of first years a killer project. He wanted us to stage a robo-war. Top three groups get an A grade in the course, no questions asked.

We worked hard on the robot. (Details once I get the robot back)

Now, we had our Electronics paper on Friday. Upon opening the paper, half of the class burst out laughing. See, Sir Munaf is lazy. He took all the questions he gave us in the first and second hourly test and made a finals paper by combining them.

The following is the only thing he said to us during the entire paper.

Kid: Sir, this is the same paper. What happened to the “you solve a hundred books and I’ll make your paper from the hundredth and first book”??

Sir: But I’m always there to deceive you *big smile*

 

I see my future. Somewhat. Maybe.

Of Ohhh CRAP!

Today, Mum kinda put two and two together.

Now she knows about my ex. *sigh* Dear old Ex.

Waiting for Mum to explode. Or something. She is definitely going to explode.

Of Being Serious

If you ever want to make a promise to someone, and you intend to keep it no matter what the future holds, you need to look them in the eye and then choose your words carefully.

If you are in front of them and you falter, you can never keep your word.

Easiest way to test your resolve.

Of a Forced Essay

As an Engineer

Ashan was a remarkable kid. He was saved from a burning building when he was only 5 by a retired civil engineer. Since then he had one aim in his life: “To make the world a better place . . as an engineer.”

He studied hard day and night to get the grades required to realise his dream. In Matric he failed. He paid someone money to give his exam for him and managed to barely pass. Same was the case with his Intermediate certificate.

He got an admission in a university and finally pursued his dream. However he was kicked out during his 4th semester for showing up for class intoxicated.

Heart broken, he was about to end his life by hanging himself from a bunch of helium balloons when the spirit of that retired civil engineer came in front of him. Keep in mind, the civil engineer wasn’t dead, but had perfected the art of Astral Projection.

“Son, I hoped you would carry forward the legacy of my fore-fathers but it seems like you need a lot of help” Said the Civil Engineer’s Projection

Boom! Lightning struck Ashan and he felt his mind change. Theorems and formulae filled his head. He could feel the spirits of Newton, Einstein, Plato and Abdul Qadeer Khan  (who unlike the Civil Engineer, were dead for centuries – the current AQK is actually a cyborg designed to fool the Americans) all talking to him. Lo behold, now Ashan could, with a flick of his wrist, calculate trajectories, completely solve Pi and take the square root of infinity. Heck, even his sneeze was faster than light.

Truly Ashan Engineer could do everything (except fix the title of this essay)

He, however, was still lazy. So he flew off to find Superman (He was also an idiot for believing superman actually existed.)

Ashan Engineer did nothing useful even as an engineer.

Another classy essay submitted by me for English. I pwn!