It was nice outside past two days, with the temperature in the cool 40s.
(40s is cool? What have I become?) I went to Birch Run outlets to
exploit the year end sales. Bought some Nike running shoes. I wanted to
see if buying running shoes would force me to run regularly.
I guess the digital camera will remain in my wish list for some more
time. I couldn't decide on which one to buy, and anyway I won't be using
it very often. So I decided to wait until the prices come down more.


I having been procrastinating on starting the final version of my paper
until now. But you know, procrastinators have the advantage of working with
the latest information...

I changed my resolution of writing diary every day to few day(s) a week.
You know, nothing interesting happens daily in the trite life of a
lowly graduate student.


The long Thanksgiving weekend begins tomorrow. Today felt like a Friday.
Though I see people around in festival mood, I can't easily relate to
these American festivals. Anyways, I can't celebrate even if I wanted to; I
have to get serious about course project this weekend.

Other plans I have for the weekend are : Reading major portion of
"Snow Crash", watching "The Last Samurai", going to some Indian restaurant
in Farmington Hills, and playing racquetball. So much for the course
project..


Happy Thanksgiving!

Christmas eve. Kind of like a Diwali night for most of the western world.
I spent most of it playing Scrabble. I would have won but for those stupid
Z and V which I couldn't place anywhere.


Hmm..End of another year. I guess I should do the customary "looking back".
It was not bad. There was some mixed fortune, though. One of my research
papers was accepted, one got rejected. I did pretty well in the courses
I took. I wanted to learn some new topics, couldn't get around to doing it.
And I still have some unfinished/unread books.


I watched the all 3 original Star Wars back to back yesterday, quite good.
Other than that I haven't done anything at all past week. Should get
started on something now..

The final exam is over. I felt I should have studied a little bit harder
and done it better. Oh well, its over and this is something that I don't
want to go back and take care of when I build my Time Machine.


I saw Return of the King. Awesome! Great movie.
The war scenes with the "olephants" was done really well. One of my
favourite scene is where Legolas single-handedly brings an olephant down.
And every bit of the visual in the "Paths of the Dead" was exactly
what I imagined it would be when I read the book. Hats off to Peter Jackson!
Some critics complain
about the long drawn ending, but I felt it all blended very well.


There is a great book in Tamil which enjoys a similar cult status
as LOTR. Its called "Ponniyin Selvan" and has 5 parts.
I wish someone makes movies of it.


Hmm, two weeks of no classes. But I have my hands full with the final
version of a paper due by January 9th. I also have some books I want to
finish reading. Lets see..

Yay! It snowed today. I looked out of my window before the snow was cleared.
Everything looked so white. To quote Bill Watterson's (Calvin and) Hobbes,
"Everything familiar has disappeared! The world looks brand new. It's
like having a big sheet of paper to draw on!". That last cartoon of
Bill Watterson is really poignant.
I'd like to name these days as "Postcard days", because when I was walking
outside this afternoon, everything was so still and motionless, it felt
like I was walking through a postcard.


The only final exam for me is on Friday, the coming week. I have a
foreboding that the week is going to painfully long with the exam in the
back of my head all the time. I guess I can make it better by preparing
for it as late as possible.


I have been doing a survey on compiler intermediate representations. I
was awed to find so much work done out there which I don't know anything about.
I am reminded of the Tamil poetess
Auvaiyar's saying,
"What we have learnt amounts to a handful of sand.
What we are yet to learn is of global proportions."

Oh boy, today was long. I got my course project done at the end of it.
I still have to wait for another week until a final exam before this
semester is completely done. That sucks.
Tonight I celebrated my birthday for the second time, with my research
group buddies.


Hmm, what else did I do past few days? I don't seem to remember. I think I
have a short term memory loss condition..

I went to watch "The Last Samurai" with Rajiv. It was decent, even with
Tom Cruise in it.


I made some interesting observations about the art of
cooking today. I think "longest job first" is a good scheduling policy.
For example, pressure cooker takes the longest, so I have to start it
before, say, keeping stuff in the microwave. Also "lazy evaluation" is
good as far as washing vessels is concerned, because there will be a lot
of overlap with other things like stuff getting cooked etc, which don't
require human intervention.


I whipped up a nifty script to download songs from MusicIndiaOnline. They
only stream the songs, so one can't save the songs for offline listening.
Rajiv showed me this Vsound ,
which is a cool mechanism to tee off data going to the sound card, also to a
file. Using this, my script can stream all songs in an album and convert
it to MP3. Of course, the script is good only until the admins of
MusicIndiaOnline decide to change their site structure.

The last few days seem like a total blur. They just passed by and I haven't
made any progress whatsoever. These strange days seem to happen to me once
in a while, especially when there are no deadlines nearby. I just totally
completely space out during those days. I wonder if everyone has days
like this.


On the positive side, the days of inactivity have worked up a fine
anxiety in me to get stuff done. Hopefully I will work with extra vigour
in the next few days before the projects and homeworks are due.


Nearly all of my lab mates have gone to
MICRO conference. It feels
weird because the lab is so silent.