This is pretty much in continuation of my previous entry - more like Part Deux of a boring movie In the last seven days that I haven’t written anything here, many things got fixed while many more were screwed - and naturally number of screw ups being way more than the former. Continuing the Newton’s Laws of Life (or Graduation), I could add an extension to the third one — For every fix-up, there are atleast two screw-ups or something to that effect. Let me start with the things that were fixed.

Remember, I wrote about mail function not functioning properly, due to an automatic update in Sendmail? It turned out that I had to re-install the OS all over again. This in turn means that I have to back up all data on the primary hard drive. I had to be bit more careful with this process, as I am no longer the only user on this machine. Having external hard drive enclosures really helps (helped) a great deal in this aspect. Not only that I no longer have to burn data onto CDs (or DVDs), I don’t even have to transfer the data to the external hard drive. I just remove the primary hard drive, put the new one in its place and once the OS has been re-installed, just mount the old primary drive using the enclosure. Life’s pretty simple, as long as the old primary drive mounts and I can restore all data from it. Fortunately, everything worked out as planned, except that my home drive is about 50GB, website is 31GB, photos take another 20GB, music another 15GB — my new primary drive was left with barely any space after re-installation This only meant that I had to re-do the installation all over again and the previously old primary drive became the primary drive again — now, I have about 40GB left in this drive and another 600GB (yeah, six hundred GB) split on three different drives. Should enough to satisfy my appetite for a while, I guess… With the newly re-installed OS, mail functions properly — most of my scripts, feedback form, and many features of WordPress now are alive again I added the Tags feature too - should help searching for entries a bit more easier.

It was another double-header in the Church League and the second game took pretty much everything from us to win it — we were trailing for most of it and score board read 6-9 at the end of 6th. We scored four more, with 2 down in the top of 7th and the other team too scored a run to tie. So, the game went extra inning and we scored just one more run — guess, it was more than sufficient as Tommy pitched to perfection, backed by a very solid defense. After the last week’s grad league softball game against HuTangClan (Humanities + Forestry), my batting average came plunging down from a perfect 1.000 as I went 2 for 4 at bats Not only that, I didn’t get in front of the ball once and missed a simple enough play at the second base. Being a team with very high expectations meant that these mistakes costed me two pitchers of beer. But good thing is I have been learning from these mistakes and we are undefeated in both these leagues

On Friday, I was innocently trying to transfer about 200 pictures from my camera to my Mac and the camera-batteries decided to die out on me. That was only the beginning - Mac thought that the device had been improperly unplugged and camera thought the Compact Flash Card wasn’t formatted. Thanks to Marg (Rohrer) and Joe Pyykkonen (Sports Photographer at Tech), I got all my photos — and I put the same card back into the camera and it works like a charm, as if nothing had happened!

I found my missing sun-glass after about two weeks - I had forgotten it in the ResNet consultants’ office while pulling up some data and it was there, sitting and waiting for me Saturday, Kyle and myself went hiking in the Hungarian Falls area. It’s funny that in the first 3.8 years, I didn’t even go there once but in the last 15 days, this is my fourth trip! However, this recent attempt was a much more elaborate effort. We took a pretty narrow trail down to the bottom of the lower falls. On the way, we discovered another falls, that pretty much hides itself from the upper trails. Few hot days had dried the water out but it would have been a herculean effort to get to the bottom of the lower falls if it wasn’t the case. Then, we went to the top of lower falls, then bottm and top of middle falls and finally, to the to the bottom of upper falls. Probably the best outcome of this trip with Kyle is that I now know that there three falls in the area — lower, middle and upper. Actually, four and half, if one takes into account the hidden lower falls, and a short drop between middle and upper falls. This knowledge means that I will have to re-caption some snaps in my gallery. Pictures below should show the contrasting differences in this area - these were shot just days apart.

First one is from the bottom of lower falls, 2 and 3 are from the top of lower falls, 4 and 5 are bottom of middle falls, 6 and 7 are some falls in between middle & upper falls, and 8 and 9 are from the bottom of upper falls!

Now to the things that were screwed up — I have come to understand that my camera has some serious limitations and I should start searching for a better camera, pretty soon. I did find a pretty good deal for a Nikon D200 with a 18-200 AF VR lens, but not sure if I can afford it right now. Some team (being the league co-ordinator, I shouldn’t mention the name) is using balls that weren’t issued by the league and I don’t understand the fact that why is it so hard to understand and stick to some very simple rules! The balls and bats we chose were to make the games more interesting and making them more safer for everybody. If they continue using it, I may have to disqualify them from the play-offs. Coming to our own team, couple of our star players are hurt and won’t be taking field in this week’s game. We have been doing pretty well, considering the long batting order and are due for a big game — hopefully, this will only the starting point of such big games this season.

As far as NBA is concerned, both my favourite teams - one from each conference - failed to get past the conference finals Pistons and Suns were both guilty of not protecting the home court and I just hope that these bitter losses will not fragment the teams. It will be good to see two first-timers fighting for National Championship (in local lingo, they are called World Championship game - but come on, there is just one team from Canada and for the record, the all-star-studded team won the bronze medal in the last olympics) but I am not sure if will be watching all the games in the next 10 days or so.

Research-wise, the progress has been pretty slow - partly due to shortage of resources and partly due to some HR/PR related issues. I am, after having witnessed and experienced such bitter instances more than once, convinced that every international person entering a US university (undergraduate, graduate, post-doc, visitors, etc) MUST undergo extensive orientation - and more so for the people who are *supposed* to teach others (course, research methods, etc). Just because someone has *taught* in some other country for a length of time doesn’t necessarily mean that their approach fits the US system. Well, neither of visitors have much time left in their stay here, but I feel particularly sorry for one of them - first housing issues and now some undue/unnecessary *comments* (and such) from the other.

Other thing that I thought I had screw-up but didn’t actually was the Tech Mail Server related problem - none of the mails I sent to any off-campus email address got delivered. I was under the impression that either some of my settings were wrong or GMail & Yahoo! had blocked me off! It turned out, after talking to IT guys, that the Tech Mail Server wasn’t handling outgoing mails very well and on Monday (yesterday) morning, all of my mails (close to 100 of them) got delivered. For more information on this and some other IT related problems over the weekend, please read this. Apart from these fix-ups and screw-ups, I did manage to roam around a bit in the upper Keewenah (Tobacco River Park, Brunette Park, Lac La Belle - a restaurant here makes the best pizza I ever had so far, Bete Grise, Brockway Mountain, Rice Lake, etc). Hopefully, things will settle down, I get to do *my* work more in the days to come, and this sunset shot (from the top of Brockway Mountain, overlooking the Lake Superior) will signal end to my miseries…