I know it has been a while since I wrote something about anything in this page - not that (at least most of) you were waiting to read it…. Well, here’s a brief summary of things that have happened in my life since my baby went back:

1. Research: Recent (and frequent) scheduled power outages in the university definitely haven’t helped the cause. Everytime there’s an outage, my calculations (submitted to the job queue) die and they need to be resubmitted all over again. This also has hampered my backup routine. In all, there is some observable progress in some aspects of a certain project but /me is definitely NOT satisfied. Unfortunately, yours-truly’s slacking/procastination has also contributed significantly to this, although I should add that the annual Freshmen Presentations went quite well (inspite of some lapses)….
2. CCLI / DCS-ITS: Work in these places has seen satisfactory progress. I completed MultiUser WordPress a while ago - currently waiting for users to test it out and send me their suggestions/comments/questions/ to improve on it. Another project (single user WordPress), hasn’t even started as one there is no news from the other person involved. At DCS-ITS, project one is almost done (at least about testing, etc.) and as part of the second project, I have come to learn quite a bit about Cookies (not the ones you eat, but Internet Cookies). Progress in second project, thanks to my slacking, as been slow and I am again NOT happy with it.
3. CEC: I worked with CEC during the past few days and gained the first-hand knowledge of setting up a Beowulf cluster (for Dr. Ranjit Pati) using Rocks approach. This work involved extensinve data backup, testing installation, installation (with RHEL 4.4 on top of Rocks 4.2.1), data restoration and testing package compatibility with the updated OS. We (at the CEC) were very glad the everything worked out as planned and there is some work to be done yet before the work is completely done.
4. Personal Cluster: Thanks to several people (Steven Camps, and all CEC personnel), I finally managed to set up a one-node beowulf cluster using Rocks 3.3.0. As of now, this cluster is not being utilized for anything except giving me an opportunity to brag around and show off my nerdiness. At some point later, I might use this set up to learn parallel programming. If you are interested, its website is here. However, contents of the page/site depend on your network connection (whether you are inside my apartment network or outside of it).
5. Home Computer: Following Timmy’s tip, I set up fetchmail to download a copy of my emails (school account as well as GMail) to local inbox - this has, for all practical purposes, removed my dependence of allotted HuskyMail storage space.

   Speaking of storage, thanks to an undisclosable source, I have 720 GB worth of personal space - which I can use (hopefully effectively) to manage my backups and increase redundancy.

   Owing to some security patch (related to malfucntioning of NFS), /me decided to upgrade the OS on my server (one that serves this website amongst other things) to latest/stablest RHEL release. During this process, /me also decided to adopt RAID1 technique - in an attempt to automate at least one backup. However, first couple attepmts to set it up failed; succeeded attempt later led to dropping out of one disk from the RAID set. All this (and more) meant that I didn’t have access to my email and you didn’t have access to this website Finally, I had to buy another 300GB drive re-setup everything. Things seem to be fine now and it will be a while before they return to normalcy.

6. Mac / Apple: Following a short but sour interaction with Apple Customer Care, I shipped my MacBook Pro back to Apple on Nov 7 and Apple received it on Nov 14. Following Kyle’s suggestion, I also wrote to Steve Jobs but haven’t heard back from him yet. However, on Nov 16, Apple sends me an email asking me to ship the MacBook Pro again! Apparently there are two departments working on the same issue and it’s disappointing to note that, given Apple’s credibility and such” these departments are not working together This lead to few more phone calls and a senior Technician at AppleCare is looking into the issue. Again, I am yet to hear from him…
7. Leisure: Amidst this busy schedule, I did manage to sneak in sometime to take short drives, attend Tech Sports events (Basketball) and shoot pictures. Ride to Porcupine Mountains had a very pleasant surprise - the summer-long construction work has resulted in one *straight* road from Houghton to the Porkies. Unfortunately, photos shot during this trip are not for public display Basektball season has started at Tech and the with better equipment, I guess the picture quality should be lot better than last time. Also, I know lot more people (players, their parents, relatives, spectators,…) than last time and so, I should know what to shoot Teams [both women (1-1) and men (2-0)] did well during the weekend tournment and I did shoot quite many pictures. Here are some of the good ones.

   In additional sports news, Wolverines (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) lost to Buckeyes (Ohio State University, Columbus) in their last regular season game. These are somethings that hurt me because of sports freakishness and Michigan patriotism…

   In more additional sports news, the day that I have long been waiting for is just few hours away from now. I will be starting to Green Bay (Wisconsin) to watch Packers host New England Patriots. If Lambeau Field Staff/Security let me take my camera into the stadium, you can expect some good pictures from my first visit to America’s Dairyland…. My excitement has no upperbound - this is one game I will not have to worry about who wins and can enjoy the game as such by rooting for good-plays. More about it in about 24 hours from now…

In a passing note, one of my buddies (thanks to Orkut) got hitched in a near-Bollywood ishtyle. Contact him for a longer (step-by-step) version of what happened or contact one of us for nutshell version. Longlive Orkut and the match it has made