Yay! I am in sunny California now. Past 2 days we were at Hotchips conference. There were some interesting talks, and some boring ones. The talk about Mars rover was great, although its got nothing to do with chips. Anyways, 2 days of good exercise for the brain
cells.

I am staying at a friends place for the rest of the week. Looking forward to some good Indian food, and other stuff I cant easily get in Ann Arbor, like warm Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Jamba Juice.

My room mate Szabolcs (its
pronounced Sabolsh) works on some haptics stuff. He wanted me to be a test subject for one of his experiments. There was a chair mounted on a platform which can move sideways. The chair had a joystick attached to it at the right armrest, and the idea was to accurately control something using the joystick (in this case, a cursor on a computer screen), when the chair was shaking randomly. Apparently, with no haptic feedback, the control accuracy was poor, and with some feedback to the joystick (similar to the jerk you get on game controllers when you hit something or get shot in a video game), the control accuracy improved. I don't know by how much, but I had fun being a test subject, sitting on a violently shaking chair. I got scared a bit the first time the platform jerked abrubtly to one side. I had a good time..

I finished reading "Dragons of Summer Flame", one of the books in Dragonlance series. Bit of extreme fantasy, I think. I like fantasy stories,but this didn't have even a wee bit of logic in it. Random events kept happening all along. It seemed like the authors didn't know what do with
all the characters. Anyways, I managed to finish it because it was a easy read and didn't take that long.

Next week, I am off to Bay area with some of my group members to attend Hotchips. I am staying there for the weekend. My taste buds have already started to anticipate some authentic south indian food at Saravana Bhavan.

I had been wanting to do something about my resume for sometime, it looked so unprofessional. So I copied some script from the net and made a more maintainable form of my resume. From a single Latex file,the HTML, PDF and text form of my resume get generated. Pretty cool.


I went camping to Michigan's upper peninsula. The campsite was pretty domesticated, but still I enjoyed sleeping under the stars for a night. We visited walked along the shores of one of the Great Lakes,visited St. Ignace downtown and went to Tahquamenon falls. Overall, a refreshing break.