It has been a while since this page saw any updates and quite many things have happened since then. Let me start with where I ended the last entry. I managed to fine tune my presentation for the Sigma Xi Student Research Colloquium just in time - being the only Mac user helped a great deal as I did not have to email my presentation a day earlier, like everybody else Apart from the fact that I had to get up very early on a Saturday morning (which I haven’t done in a long sometime), everything else went smooth. Organizers had scheduled the talks in such a way that there were three sessions (instead of the usual two)and I was the last speaker in the second session - this ensured that even if changing machines and making Mac work took longer than expected, break-time could be cut short to start the next session on time. Fortunately, it took just about 30 seconds to make my Mac work and KeyNote worked great

Being 10+2+2 minutes slots, almost all presentations were very crisp and on variety of topics, though many of them had improper color schemes and/or too small a font-size. It was nice to see four Physics participants, each from a different field, presenting their research. One that impressed me a lot (which eventually won the first prize) was in essence implying that cookbooks should be considered Scientific and Technical Communication (STC). I supported this idea since most of the STC (especially CS related books) are called Cookbooks, why not cookbooks be classified as STC? My presentation, Interaction of Biological Matter with Nanomaterials - A First-Principles Approach won the second prize (here’s the official announcement) — discussing with Ralph and Dr. P, practicing a few times to get timing right helped a great deal. As far as participating in such events and winning goes, Mac/KeyNote is one up against Windows/PowerPoint!!.

Having spent the morning fruitfully, I roamed around the ex-mining areas of Houghton-Hancock and took lot of nicer pictures. Soon, it was time for dinner at Dr. P residence. Needless to mention the food was, as usual, great and time seemed to fly rather quickly.

Much of Sunday afternoon was again spent in roaming around the local areas (Misery Bay, Agate Beach, Twin Lakes, Pelkie, Tapiola, …) and 2 hours after 9 pm were usefully invested in watching Pride & Prejudice, something that sounds very familiar to people who read Jane Austen’s works. I have come to understand that there are two filmized versions of this novel but I am talking about the latest one, made in 2005. Honestly, I don’t know how to classify this movie - as a comdey or a serious drama! Well, irrespective of my classification, Lizzie and Darcy as a whole, Jane’s grace, and Mr. & Mrs. Bennett are more than sufficient to keep one glued to the seat for the entire length of the movie but other characaters, I must accept, do their part quite well as well. The other side effect of watching this movie is that I (can) now understand You Have Got Mail - Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan movie in which there are repeated references to Mr. Darcy and Lizzie… Given a chance, I would love to see Pride & Prejudice once more and probably read the novel as well.

Last four days or so have been pretty hectic, in terms of school and research related activities. I modified parts of a certain script that runs a Molecular Dynamics code along with Gaussian03. There was also some sort of progress in the big project but lot of time had to be spent in computers / sys-admin work - laxmi’s (laxmi is the name of one of our single processor linux research machine) primary hard drive hasn’t been working well, attempts to replace Gaussian03 with DMol3 in the aforementioned script appeared to consume few days and somebody confused me with their definition of binding energy in VASP. Fortunately, Ralph clarified my confusion - else I would have been forced to redo almost all the calculations. It wouldn’t take much time to repeat them but repeating them just because we have the facility doesn’t really make sense.

Today was also the last meeting of the Linux Users’ Group for 2005-06 academic year and I wish I had my camera to capture those hilarious moments. Anyway, I am leaving for Livonia (somewhere in lower Michigan, near Detroit) to attend PenguiCon 4.0 - a conference for Open Source Software and Science Fiction. This is the first meeting (that I am attending) for which I haven’t done any arrangments and feels kinda awkward, though. Kyle, who has done much or all of it, will be picking me up around 6 am tomorrow and we will be driving, on the way back, through Flint to see Chong (Tim). Hope it will be fun and more importantly, new week will be much better than the last one!