The strange feeling

The strange feeling as the title suggests is quite strange indeed. I am a big fan of it, and I experience it quite a lot. The familiar sensation of your eyes burning while they become blood red due to lack of sleep, and the momentary lapses of concentration are the fun parts of the strange feeling. As against common belief that this occurs only when a person does not sleep for long hours; the feeling creeps in even if you have had terribly low amount of sleep.

As an example, I was up till almost 6 am yesterday night working on my internship homework [Yes, I do pile up my work till the very end :P ]. I had to get up at 8 and push off for work after that. The feeling had crept in once I got up from bed. The following data is what I have collected from all my strange feeling experiences. The times that are given are approximately after 20-22 hours of lack of sleep, followed by a maximum of 2 hours of sleep.

0-2 hours: During this time, a bath or the simple act of washing your face can make u forget the feeling, although the burning eyes are hard to get rid of :). Interestingly, your calves start hurting a bit, I have never understood why.

2-4 hours: This time is the best, the feeling does not interfere in your normal work.

4-8 hours: The feeling starts returning, and a nice lunch can solve the issue; considering in my time table this is lunch time. The lunch gives you intense satisfaction, but then leads to a strong pull to sleep.

8-12 hours: This a generally lazy time. It is hard to do anything productive in this time, and there is a slight risk of going off to sleep.

12-14 hours: This is the toughest part. You will feel sleep overcoming you so strongly, that most novices can’t get past this point. Even veterans sleep for sometime at this point if they have nothing interesting to do :)

14-18 hours: Once you are past the 14 hour mark, its a easy ride for sometime, a good meal [not too heavy, too heavy meals are dangerous :P ] can help you concentrate here.

18-24 hours: This is the fun part. You start feeling you are in a dream sometimes. Your mind slips in and out of reality as it plays games with you while you work. The lapses in concentration widen, and it takes some time to get used to this. I would not suggest driving past this point, unless you are taking strong help from caffeine :)

24-30 hours: This is where you can work, but this is where I start thinking “why the hell am I awake for so long? Nothing is this important” My limit is reached somewhere around here, and I collapse, and give in to the strange feeling.

Right now I am at the 15 hour mark, and relaxing, writing my blog, listening to music, as I prepare myself for the ride ahead. As and when I reach new points, I shall release a new version of this post, with my new experiences.

PS: Anyone who has reached further, which I am sure most of you must have, kindly let me know of the dangerous points of time to stay alert :P

Free

The word used as the title here is a highly abused word is what I personally feel. There are a lot of ways in which it is used. Interestingly, every meaning that I know of the word free has a very interesting meaning. As I just said, all the types of “free”s are highly abused by people during talking. The word free, when searched for on wikipedia, gives a page asking what type of “free” am I looking for. The options given over there are broadly classified into:

Computer Science
Intellectual Property
Literature
Mathematics
Philosophy
Popular Music
Public Services
Other

This is much much much more than what I had expected, but then it seems that my experience with the word “free” is very limited, and there is much more that I need to learn. From what I know, the various uses of “free” are:

Free as in no cost price:
This is every marketing person’s favorite type of free. It is the thing which draws crowd, which sells other stuff, and is very powerful and attractive. I am guessing most people use free in this sense. It is the most searched for word on www.google.com, or any other search engine, is what I am guessing.

Free NOT as in free beer:
The title is self-explanatory. Any guy who is even minutely “Open” minded, will guess that this free refers to the “free” of the Free Software Foundation. This is another wildly abused free, all over the Open Source and Free Software community. It is used and explained in every instance where anything related to FSF is mentioned.

Free as in freedom:
This is the philosophical take on the issue. It is also a very talked about free, in history, civics and god knows what other places. The only thing that I think of when I hear freedom is the lyrics:

With Silence comes Peace
With Peace comes Freedom
With Freedom comes Silence

-Illusion and Dreams, Poets of the Fall

Somehow though, today when I saw the word freedom, that is not the first thing that crossed my mind. I was afraid when I heard the word. Its been a long time since preparation for QUARK ‘08 began. I realized that I have never had freedom as such during the whole time. Although it has been the best time I have had in college so far, I still think that freedom was one thing I was denied, due to the overbusy state I was in constantly.
As I sit here at my comp typing away leisurely, thinking about life after 2 days, when the tests are over, and finally I am left in the “post-QUARK” trauma, I realize that its gonna be hard.

As I had mentioned in my earlier post, doing such stuff has completely blocked any chance of my social life improving, no wait, its not even kept the same, its decaying slowly. As some sort of compensation to the whole situation, I guess I had gotten involved in this to a point that it was my social life. Its funny though. Its all over, and now the weird time starts.

20/2/2008 2100hrs:
[Im having maggi at Nescafe, and my Chief comes and happens to sit at my table]
Me: Hey
Chief: Hey
Me: So….., wassup?
Chief: nm, exams going on…
Me: [trying to do small talk]Oh….. what paper tomorrow?
Chief: Ah… Programming Languages, I have freaking 80% of this book tomorrow
Me: Be happy uve got only one paper…, I have 2, and im still in EEE 2nd year
Chief: [sudden spurt of enthusiasm in voice] Chal chuck that, tell me what have you thought of the magazine idea?
Me: [relieved, and totally into the convo now] We are going ahead with it, itll definitely help QUARK ‘09 in a big way
…and blah blah blah…

Its still weird to think that it is all over. I will be writing about my team, and its special members in the near future, as I am now officially “free”, it will be sooner than the average gap I have between posts.

PS: I had once in the past tried to write down what all I have learned from QUARK when it was 45 days away. Now that it has been 12 days past it, I realize that it is quite futile to do so. I believe www.wordpress.com will run out of space if I get down to writing what QUARK, and what the Organizing Committee have taught me.