abdeet.net

Abhi Senthilkumar's website



Fun Stuff

This is a miscellaneous page for me to put anything I find interesting on. Hopefully someone enjoys it.

Favorites

Here's a list of my favorites in a variety of categories. These lists aren't exhaustive - there's too many options and I can't put all of them on here.

Favorite bands and some favorite songs from that band

Favorite movies

  1. Güeros
  2. The Name of the Rose

Favorite TV shows

  1. Seinfeld
  2. Arrested Development
  3. The Wire

Favorite foods

Favorite states

  1. Maryland
  2. New Jersey
  3. California

Frequently Asked Questions

I don't really get any questions frequently enough for this to pose useful, so I'll just add some questions I want to answer.

Where did you grow up? I was born in Boston, and I lived in Nashua, NH for the first part of my life. I lived in Singapore for six years1, and now I live in Urbana, MD2,3.

1To be exact, I grew up in Bukit Gombak. I talked to some Singaporean guys here in Zürich, and apparently that is the SG equivalent of the boonies. In their mind, no one lives there and it's just a military base. Well, I lived there!

2According to the Postal Service4, I live in Frederick. That's because Urbana is an unincorporated suburb. If I'm talking to people in Frederick, I say Urbana5. If I'm talking to people in Maryland, I say Frederick6. If I'm talking to people from somewhere else I say Washington D.C.7.

3I have a lot of Maryland pride as I think most Marylanders have. Our flag rocks, we have great state parks, we drive very well - what more could you want?

4Not the band. I imagine if they knew about Urbana they would also say I'm from Frederick. I know what you're thinking: a footnote in a footnote? Sorry for the egregious use of them. I just realized I could do this and it's really funny to me. The joke will wear off tomorrow but the footnotes will remain.

5In Frederick County, at the high school level, there is some level of animosity towards Urbana because it is the most affluent suburb. I accept the criticism as valid, however, I will forever be a Hawk.

6Frederick is also probably the best city in Maryland.8 Due to how Montgomery County zones, Frederick is the second biggest city in MD after Baltimore. We also have a really nice downtown. Check it out!

7I know a lot of cities have a thing about suburbanites saying they're from the city, but I have never gotten that feeling with D.C. To be fair, I don't know too many people who live in the city because I go to University of Maryland, but also D.C. is the only real landmark in the area, especially for clueless Europeans (just kidding, I love you Europeans).

8This could be interpreted as Baltimore slander, but I really like Baltimore. I've been there a decent amount for baseball games and concerts and it is a pretty city. I also reflexively defend Baltimore because every out-of-stater just goes "haha, that city is super dangerous". I mean, yeah The Wire is really good, but the city is much more than that. It just isn't as good as Frederick, sorry!

Where do you go to school? If you looked at the home page you wouldn't be asking this question, but I'll answer it anyways. I go to the University of Maryland, College Park. Currently, however, I am at the University of Zürich, in Switzerland.

What do you study? I am currently aiming for a dual degree in chemical engineering and computer science. When I was applying to college, I knew I really liked to do math and program. My mom1 told me under no circumstances should I become a computer scientist. I heeded her warning and decided to do chemical engineering, because my dad2 told me it would be a lot of math. I didn't like chemistry that much but he assured me there wasn't too much chemistry in chemical engineering. He was right, there isn't too much chemistry in chemical engineering and the chemistry that does exist is actually pretty fun. I really like chemical engineering. It's more of a process engineering degree than anything else and it scratches an itch I didn't know needed scratching. I also realized that I wasn't a huge fan of writing code for the sake of writing code, and I enjoyed working on more science-oriented programming projects a lot more. I did want to learn more computer science theory so I decided to add on a CS major. With a lot of moving courses around and two hellish semesters, I am on track to graduate on time.

1A computer scientist.

2A chemical engineer.

How are you studying abroad? As I weakly alluded to in the last answer, I really like organizing things, something that is essential for chemical engineering. I have a lot of Excel spreadsheets tracking many aspects of school and life. The main problem with trying to study abroad as a chemical engineer is that most courses are offered only once a year. Not all of them, however. I was able to find a window during the fall of my junior year that I could move courses out of to the bookending springs. Computer science, with its 1E9 students, has courses offered year-round, so the main constraint became how much I was willing to suffer. You know how sometimes when there's a car crash, mothers will get superhuman strength and lift the car up to save their kid? Turns out the same thing happens to me but with finding the will to get through a particularly bad semester. The light at the end of my tunnel was getting to hang out in Europe for five months.

How is studying abroad? Really, really worth it. If I could cast my voice into the mind of every college student in the world, I would say "study abroad". One thing I get is that it's expensive. Zürich is insanely expensive, but somehow my tuition and rent are lower so I am on track to actually save money. What remains to be seen is if I will blow through my bank account buying food here. There are so many tangible and intangible benefits to studying abroad. The biggest tangible for me is the public transportation. Zürich has a really extensive tram system so getting around is a tram ride in the park. Switzerland in general is really good with trains, and by strategically buying half-fare cards, night passes, and the Eurail pass, I can get around for pretty cheap. I think the biggest intangible is being able to meet people from all over the world and learn from them. Another is that life is much more relaxed here. This is entirely because I am studying abroad though.1 Still, I would really recommend studying abroad.

1A funny remark from my German TA: When greeting someone in Zürich, it is customary to reply to "how are you?" with "good, but stressed." You must never let someone think you aren't stressed, because they will assume you are lazy and taking it easy. Also, when walking around the university, move with purpose. Whether you have purpose or not, you should always exude purpose so people recognize how busy you are. How true this is, I don't know.

How did you make this website? abdeet.net was written in pure HTML/CSS, by hand. That sounds really terrible but I find it kind of meditative. images.abdeet.net was written in Flask so that I could do backend stuff. There are other *.abdeet.net domains but they are mostly dormant and mostly written in HTML as well. I host all of them off my Raspberry Pi with NGINX as a reverse proxy and Apache or Gunicorn as the web server.

How do you write code? I write most of my code in terminal Emacs off of my Raspberry Pi, which I SSH into using Windows Terminal as the terminal emulator. I also use tmux a lot to have multiple terminals open and save them. Why do I do this? Honestly I couldn't tell you. The easiest reason is that the stripped down nature and multitude of keybinds that Emacs offers makes me a much faster developer. I can't say whether that's true. Plus, you could follow up by asking why I use terminal Emacs and not GUI Emacs, which has the same keybinds but the advantage of being able to actually display things. My honest answer is that I only figured out X Windows like a week ago and my Raspberry Pi is too weak to run GUI Emacs at a reasonable speed. In any case, I just feel comfortable using terminal Emacs. I initially started with Emacs because my PI made an offhand remark about how slow I was with Nano, and that Emacs would be better. If I am forced to develop with an actual GUI, I generally use VSCode.

What do you want to do after you graduate? I currently want to go to graduate school for chemical or bioengineering research. Beyond that, I am not entirely sure right now. That's a hard question, thanks a lot.