Spring is here. It was in the 50s and I walked outside without my jacket.
There were little patches of snow on the ground. I wanted to laugh
a villanous laugh at them and say, "Thats the sound of your death!".
I am being silly.

I found this poem in some forum. I bet anyone who did schooling in Madras can identify with all of what it says. Especially the part about playing cricket with writing pad as bat, and "Big Fun" bubble gums. Man, that brings nostalgia.

Some song has been driving me mad past 2 days. I heard it in radio and
recognised it as one of those I used to listen to long time back, and I want
to listen to it again. Worst part is, I can't seem to recall either the
lyrics or the tune, but am sure I can recognise it when I hear it again.
Its frustrating not being able to recall...

Its still cold and snowy in Michigan and I have got lots of stuff to do
this week. So even though its spring break this week, its neither
spring, nor break for me :(.

I went to Pittsburgh yesterday with Rajiv and Somesh. We visited the
popular (with Indians) Venkateshwara temple there. It was nice to hear
Thiruppavai chanting after what feels like eons. The temple kitchen
served awesome Uppuma and curd rice.

We also visited some museums there. I saw a whole T.Rex skeleton for the
first time. But for the cold and wind, we would have done some more
exploring around downtown. We just walked to the Ohio rivershore, took
some snaps and had to run back to the car to escape the cold.

One of the highlights of the trip was the visit to Krispy Kreme. Thier
fresh-made melt-in-your-mouth glazed doughnuts were simply divine.

I hope I survive this week without much work backlog..

CSA department of IISc (that's where I went for masters) had an exciting
programming contest yesterday. My roommate and I had fun solving some
of the problems. We could have solved all of them if we had not been busy
during the day. Here are the problems , for the inquisitive. I wonder whether such problems will come up in real life at all.

I have been wanting to add a comments feature for this diary. The fact
that not many read it is not helping me greatly. Anyways, it will atleast
serve to amuse myself with PHP hacking for few hours. I am not sure
when I will get those hours, though.

3:00 PM

It is "just" cold now, not "bitter" cold or "someone please kill me" cold.
I guess not having a wind takes half the cold out.
And today is also one of those "postcard" days.

8:00 PM

Ok, its again "someone please kill me" cold. Brrrr....

Its been a long time since I bought books, so I thought I will order some
today. I wanted to buy Neal Asher's Line of Polity, because some friend
told me it was good and also I read some good reviews. Amazon didn't
have it :(. Anyway, I ordered The Silmarillion and Oryx and Crake.

That was a long gap. I wasn't extremely busy or anything. I guess it was
a combination of lethargy and a the fact that nothing really happened
to put in the journal.

The assignments for the algorithms class have been coming regularly. Its
amazing how seemingly simple problems don't look simple at the second
look. The nice (or not so nice) thing about algorithms is, it is like
an art. Even though there is lot of theory funda behind stuff, it
requires imagination and a flash of genius to come up with a good
solution. In my opinion, systematic scientific approach is very
difficult, or impossible, for coming up with elegant algorithms.

I have been playing some old Super Nintendo games lately. These
are the games that most Americans who were kids during 80's grew up with.
That reminds me of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and an ATARI I got from my
uncle when I was in sixth standard. They both still work. I used to be
very good at Pacman on ATARI.

Hmm.. Haven't seen a movie in a while. No good ones are coming this
weekend. Maybe I should watch some old ones..

Looks like something is wrong with my counter script. I had a file with
pairs, one per line. Last week, all of a sudden it got
erased and the counts started at zero. Maybe there was some problem with
locking. Luckily my log file has all the hits in the NCSA log format, so
its no big deal. I should change the counter script it to use a database,
maybe.