Ah, Saturday.

Phew. Today was a Saturday, so Muni’s staff didn’t come in (after all, it is a weekend). Instead, I realized that in the free time I have Nepal, I could dedicate my time towards self-studying a few concepts. I’ve always been interested in computer programming, as it is generally right or wrong, true or false, 1 or 0. I also think that you cannot truly understand computers if you don’t understand computer programming, so I’ve been reading all the materials I can get my hands on C and C++, a very common computer language. While I am completely new to “programming” in terms of making desktop applications, I have a little bit of experience programming for the web with PHP (the blog you are reading is done entirely in PHP, although to be honest only ~20% of the code is mine, the rest coming straight from Wordpress and Wordpress developers).

Anyway, it’s been an excellent first day learning programming. I have finally wrapped my head around exactly what binary code is, how to read it, how to convert it to hexidecimal, how it can be interpreted and used in a number of different ways, why a “byte” is eight “bits”, the significance of numbers such as 65,535, the difference between signed and unsigned integers, etc. I have also made two incredibly basic programs in C, one which says “Hello World!” (classic), and one which will output the sum of three variables you input. I’m trying to do more than just copy code from tutorials, really making an effort to understand why each line of code does what it does. Hopefully by the time I leave Nepal I will have learned two languages: one that lets me talk to people, one that lets me talk to computers.

Other than that, however, not much happened (yes, I really did that much reading on programming today!). Muni, Nani and I went out, first to the supermarket (the kind of place with checkout counters and shopping carts, not the local vegetable market). Among other things, I picked up the book “Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman!”. While I had previously passed up the chance to get the book at Page One in Hong Kong, I thought the experience of having a book about Quantum Physics that I picked up in the used book section of a supermarket in Nepal would be an awesome party story. Right? Right?

After the supermarket, we went for a twenty minute drive to Muni’s mechanic — his car shakes uncontrollably for ten or fifteen seconds when you turn it off. Unfortunately, the mechanic was meditating (or so I was told), so we decided to drive back to Muni’s and return to the mechanic another day, rather than disturb him.

Click for the full 1500 x 1000 image.

As I was posting this for the first time, the power cut out. This gave me the opportunity to take photos of Nepal when there is load shedding. One interesting thing to note is that its not a large blackout as far as the eye can see: for one thing, most homes have either generators or battery backup systems to keep electricity for a few hours after it gets shut down. Also, not all of Nepal goes down at once: while they aren’t technically rolling blackouts, not every neighborhood gets access cut off: large tourist destinations and government offices get priority, for instance.

A hotel popular with tourists remains lit, while buildings in the foreground burn candles for light.

That’s all for now.
Charles