Things haven’t been going my way for past week to 10 days - don’t know the reason(s). This post will be sort of mixture of things that went right and things that didn’t. As /me mentioned in the previous post, Detroit Pistons won game #7 against the Cavs. It wasn’t a blow out the way I had anticipated but Pistons’ defense was par excellence - allowing a team (with a player like King James) only 23 points in the entire second half speaks for itself. However, this team (I mean Pistons) hasn’t been doing too well in the Eastern Conference Finals against Miami. As of writing this post, they are trailing 1-2 in the series and game #4 is going on. On the other side (i.e., Western Conference), Spurs lost to Mavs in their own home-court in game #7 and personally I would have wished to have had them in the Finals, against Pistons. But I just gotta wait and see if Pistons can make it to the Finals at all this time around

Research-wise, /me is making some progress but have also been spending quite a bit of time with our group’s visitor from India, in discussing the project and getting him acquainted in using VASP. The manuscript we had been working on is pretty much done and it took about 2 days to redo most of the graphics - they look lot nicer and with Dr. P’s new / condensed approach, the manuscript is much crispier - it doesn’t make the reader boring, at least I think so. In the next 12-14 days or so, I have to finish about 1000 (yeah, one thousand) 4-processor, 2-hour each calculations to meet what we wrote in an abstract. It looks like a daunting task - especially with more users submitting bigger jobs and our resources have started to look insufficinent. Scheduled power outages might actually slow down the progress of this big-project.

Moving onto sports, our team has been doing reasonably well in different softball leagues. In almost every game, it’s our defense that has won the games and our offense needs to improve significanlty to beat tougher opponents in the weeks to come. Much of offensive failures (not only our team, but throughout the Grad League) has been due to the change in rules - which means we are using less livelier balls (44 COR / 375 lbs compression, if you were looking for details) and ASA 2004 certified bats. Players from many teams have been complaining but as we have come to realize during our post-game post-mortem in bars, we just got to change the way we play and continue to win. Our performance in the last game against PE 1 (Physical Education, usually comprised of students who play to earn a course credit) raised many a eye-brows - it wasn’t the fact that we won but the margin (11-7) that surprised many. Undoubtedly, this was the best PE team I have played against in the last 4 years and we are still in the process of re-building our team. Just like every year, we have several new faces in the roster but unlike last couple years, many of our practice sessions have been snowed/rained out. Last practice session was pretty decent and team composition & chemistry is getting better with every such session. Though it’s way too early and you might think /me is cocky, but trust me - I see little obstacle in being part of this Team Fiziks Dynasty in about 10 weeks from now… I also got to play couple innings in a Men’s League match (thanks to Tommy Savola) but didn’t contribute anything - even worse, I suck at high pitches — struck out once, ground out once, sac-flied once and the only time I managed to reach a base was with a walk

I have lived about four years in this area and had known about many falls in the local area - but transportation problem had prevented me from seeing most of them. In the last 10 days or so, I visited Hungarian Falls three times. First time, thanks to a gentleman who sent me the long way, I walked about 2 miles only to get to the bottom of Lower Hungarian Falls (until my second visit, I thought it was the upper one - that’s a whole different story). Problem with the route I followed is that there is no easy way to get to the upper falls. Second time I went, I didn’t carry my camera - trust me, this place is like a remoteness in remoteness (you know what I mean) and offers very pleasant views of forest cover with Portage Canal in the background. Some of the better pics are below and for rest of them, please check this page.

Being the long-weekend (it’s Memorial Day in the US, honoring all those people who are/were part of the Services), I found some time to roam around Daniell Heights and shot some nicer pictures. However, they recieved severe but constructive criticism from folks in Planet-PhotoGeeks. Again, some of them are below; for the rest, check the same page I mentioned before:

During this long weekend, I attended the High School Graduation party of Dr. P’s daughter. Party was well organized and well attended, and needless to mention, the food was awesome. It was my first such party and looking at her achievements in the past four years that I have seen, I was forced to wonder where did this kid get so much time to all these and have a 4.0 GPA? If I was wondering about her progress in the last four years, there were others who have seen her grow from the day she was born and they still weren’t ready to believe…

Talking about Geeky things, sendmail update seems to have caused some issues and mail function doesn’t work. I have seen several complaints on this matter in different sites but no one seems to know the problem. This forced me to search for alternatives and not surprisingly, PINE came to my rescue. I remember having compiled it (i.e., PINE) with certain modifications (to prevent it from asking me for password everytime) and after a bit of searching around, I learnt that PINE can send mails from the command-line too. Very nifty, /me believes. So, I spent couple hours in modifying parts of many scripts so that I get timely intimation. FYI, below is the command:

pine -I ^X,y -subject "Blah" user@domain.com < text-file-that-will-be-the-body

On a passing note, I started learning PERL and it has been very hot in Houghton (not that these two are related in any way). My server has been crying for much of the long weekend and hopefully, we get reasonable warm temps here. Also, my technical freakiness bought me an FM transmitter (to play songs from my iPod on a radio) and a book, Adobe Photoshop CS - both these are nifty in their own respects, and I hope to learn more from the latter I will leave you with couple more pictures, of Sun signing off in McLain State Park and with a note that no special effects and/or post-processing was done to these pictures. Aren’t they pretty??