running away

I have often thought about it, running away from everything and everyone I know, just keep going and never stopping. I tried a small experiment once while I was working in Chicago, Instead of getting off at my regular on the green line I would just sit and get off at the next stop. Didn't happen. We were doing a big code release at work that day and I couldn't be late. I didn't try it again.
What kind of a person can loosen his/her mental/physical attachments to the environment so much that they can just leave their daily life and never look back? Jack Kerouac once said something like If you own a rug you own too much. I wonder what it would be like, to run away. I guess it would be very liberating for a few moments. I read a biography called "The Last American Man", the guy rode a horse all the way from one end of the US to the other end. I guess the heat in Riyadh (close to 50C) is getting to me. I need a vacation in some place cool. Some place nice where I can just relax.
In other news, I was accepted in Duke University for their Cross Continent MBA program starting this August. I'm still waiting for the loan information to come through so that I can make a final decision about attending, I really want to do it and I was pretty anxious about the whole thing till I remembered a Hadees that basically said " The pens have been lifted and the ink has dried" basically meaning our destiny has been decided. How does one reconcile destiny with free will? Bah... too many thoughts for one post, specially one written after such a long hiatus.

Quotes from Einstein

"Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest."

Those words were said by Einstein, amongst the greatest scientist/thinkers of our time, he spent his life working on some of the most intriguing problems of his/our time. His quotes are a source of inspiration for me; another quote of his is
"What does a fish know about the water it swims in?"
I am reading a book on chaos called "CHAOS The amazing science of the unpredictable" by James Gleick. I picked up last year in Dubai. It's been a pretty good read so far, with some really though provoking arguments and some really interesting questions. Two of the ones that really seem trivial to start with are
Q1. Does wind have a velocity?
Q2. Can you measure the length of a coast line?
I will let you figure out those on your own but I will provide an answer to another question to help you start thinking about the answers.
Q3. How many buckets of water are in the Pacific Ocean?
A3. It depends on the size of the bucket.

Unfortunately very few bookstores in Saudi Arabia carry good books on science/math. I have been trying to get my hand on a book on Fourier transforms for a while but have had no luck. I applied for a credit card so I could buy it but it online but I was turned down. I applied for a card at the bank I work at, and they turned me down! *Insert explicative here* what the !@#$ do I need to do to get a credit card? There is more than one way to skin a cat... So I will be applying for a card at a competing bank and get approved because I have to enough money in my account to qualify for one. Plus, I don’t have bad credit history, heck I don’t have a credit history, not that it matters in Saudi Arabia. I have always been amazed at how much importance a credit history plays in the lives of people in the USA and how it matters little to none in Saudi Arabia.
Well enough of that, time to go back to writing plugins for eclipse. I can't get my plugin to connect to mysql on my target runtime; I have got to keep working on it.