What have I been doing in the last one week, you ask? Well, I have been kinda busy. Everybody is busy, you say?? I agree - but I have been busier Let me explain. I started moving out of Jasper Avenue residence back to Heights last Friday and I still haven’t completed the act of moving yet. Thankfully, Dave has been kind enough (as he has always been) and I hope to complete (and clean up) before this week ends. Amongs the things that I miss, in no particular order, are — Shady (our smart kitty), the couch in TV room (so many naps on that), watching sports with Evan (NBA, NFL — best memories being those of 2005 NBA playoffs with Evan and Cory Arthur, and SuperBowl in 2005 & 2006 - when the teams we supported — Patriots and Steelers respectively — won), music, and so on. Moving into Heights hasn’t been particularly pleasant, mostly due to rude and untrusting behavior of community assistant. Hopefully, things in this aspect will get better with time.

Then onto school and research, I can’t say I have made significant progress but with minimal progress that has taken place, I have learnt some interesting things. Noise, dust and disturbance due to on-going renovation in Fisher Hall reminds me a lot about my student days in India, Bangalore to be precise. Having studied myself in shoorr-sharaba in India for much of my studenthood, this is feeling like a cakewalk. We, in our research group, will be having another short term visitor — arriving tomorrow and with the new group laptop that we bought (Dell Inspiron 6xxx), I have been having serious difficulties in getting the ipw3945 wireless card to work. Problem is that most discussion forum(s) I checked, just report the same problem but no solution

What else have I been busy with? I managed to edit the style sheet for our LUG members’ Planet page and as of now, it looks awfully similar to some of my Planet pages. But /me also believes that it’s a good start and can be enhanced from hereon. I have been learning some seriously important things while discussing with a new found friend, Deepti, a grad student Piling Higher and Deeper (a.k.a. pursuing Ph.D) in UNM, Albuquerque — most important lessons being that World and Justice are oxymorons and that I should search for people who read what I write irrespective of who I am. So, keeping these in mind, I spent about an hour last night - submitted my RSS feeds to several news channels and subscribed myself to the IRC of Planet PhotoGeeks - got some of pics critiqued and learnt quite a bit about photography too, atleast some technical terms — Curves, Sharpening, Color Balancing, Barrel Distortion Correction, Feathered Layers, Flash Offset, etc…

About today, not pretty at all - apart from some minor step ahead in research, helping a fellow grad student, Vithal Tilvi, with some scripting and a surprise gift from Anil (Mastering Digital SLR Photography by David Busch), rest everything was bad - and went from bad to worse. First off, it has been raining heavily for the past couple days and has left the entire area well soaked. Though it means that leaves look lot greener and cleaner, it also means that the first week of GSC League Softball games could not be played. Not only did it rain, but we also got god-damned SNOW today! Just when we (we as in natural as well as adopted YooPers) thought Winter was over and Summer was here, the former makes it presence felt all over again - if you don’t believe, take a look at these pictures - you will, pretty soon… First one is the picture of rear windshield, second is that of Sunroof and the last one is that of myself - seen shooting in the rear view mirror — look carefully in that mirror and you will snow on the rear windshield

Let me think, whom can I blame for this snow? Not me, not you, but probably Bob Gilreath - a very good person that I have known for almost four years now. How, you ask? I will explain — while the rules and regulations for this season’s GSC Softball League were being drafted, one of them read…

Each game will have 7 innings. The game is complete after the 5th inning if darkness and/or weather interferes with play. In case of dangerous weather conditions (lightning, hail, etc.), game will be called immediately. It is team managers’ responsibility to re-play such a game.

and being the very experienced player he is (yeah true, he has played softball and soccer for much longer than I have ever been alive), Bob Gilreath edited the above to

Each game will have 7 innings. The game is complete after the 5th inning if darkness and/or weather interferes with play. In case of dangerous weather conditions (lightning, hail, snow, etc.), game will be called immediately. It is team managers’ responsibility to re-play such a game.

and coincidentally, first week’s games are literally snowed out — and this happens only in the UP!! Well, from the safety view-point, it’s a good thing that we rescheduled these games to the week of July 20 and weather permitting, our season will start next Thursday.

As if snowing out of games wasn’t sufficient, I learnt about a friend of mine being part of some accident, that left him hospitalized for couple weeks or so - knowing what a person he is, I am quite sure it wouldn’t have been his fault and probably, somebody, who was responsible for the accident, went scotfree, as my friend does not recollect the scene of accident. Just glad to know that he is recovering well. Hope things will get really better for my friend, and slightly better for me — God, I am selfish….