Considering the fact that I have been using / playing with / hacking this beautiful piece of Open Source Software called WordPress for as long as I have been, it did surprise me quite a bit that it took me so long to attend my first WordCamp. Then again, I shouldn’t be that surprised - [...]

As weird as it might sound, none of the men’s team from my school, Michigan Tech, had ever beaten a men’s team from our arch rivals, Northern Michigan, when I was part of the audience. I thought it had to do with my physical presence in the gym but apparently watching them over the internet [...]

I might sound like a broken record but as happy and excited as I was about ten days ago to be going there, I was equally sad & depressed to be going away from it - at least until the next time, whenever that may be… Looking back at these ten days while I awaited [...]

The Days (Years) Leading Up To The Day
It was the mid 90s - while much of our community was enjoying the new found concept of Satellite TV (Star Sports, BBC, CNN and Chinese Entertainment were the only satellite channels on the menu), the concept of TV itself - as was everything else that [...]

It has been nearly five months since I moved from Upper Michigan to the East Coast. I would be lying if I said I liked this move and that I have been enjoying my stay here in general. I would also be lying if I said I haven’t met cool/kind/friendlier people in this part of [...]

It’s hard to believe - at least for me - that it has already been THREE months since I moved to New Jersey, and more importantly, it has been an equally long time since I last tasted beer! With many of my friends graduating (or should I say gradumatating?) from Michigan Tech this Spring, plans [...]

The Outing
After much deliberation by my dear friend (and his colleagues) that lasted for nearly 18 hours, it was decided that on Sunday, the 6th of April 2008, they would visit Delaware Water Gap National Recreational Area. The underlying plan was to have their portraits taken (by yours-truly) with waterfalls/ravines/woods as the background.

Why Worth Forgetting?
After [...]

Yes - I agree and thanks to my buddy Kyle for reminding me earlier in the evening about … me not having posted anything in a while. Apart from mundane aspects associated with settling down and setting up an apartment from scratch, I haven’t done much to write about. On that note, I must accept [...]

The much awaited (federal) document showed up in mail a day before SuperBowl and that meant I had to ship a bunch of boxes to my new address, give away a bunch of other stuff, …, get ready to move and, move. Talking about Super Bowl, the party turned out to be a nicer one [...]

Hard to believe … but it has been approximately 66 months since I came to US. I don’t even know where or how to begin explaining my experiences as a graduate student in Michigan Tech University and as a resident of Houghton community. Flying out of MoTown and seeing the sky-scrapers all around, I remember [...]

It was nearly 15 years ago that one of my high school teachers, during a casual conversation, explained/defined what marriage is - on a lighter note: It’s an examination where the guy looses his bachelor’s degree and the girl gets her master’s degree. And this past weekend, two of my friends started taking that examination… [...]

As much of the human kind (at least those who follow NFL - a.k.a. the American Football) has come to learn, the New England Patriots became the first team (since the league went to the current 16 game format in 1978) to go undefeated during a regular season. Except for folks in the New England [...]

With all that has been going for the past several weeks and some significant developments, it feels like I am in a race car … driven by somebody else! To keep up with these changes, one of the very important things I had to do was to find a new home - eHome of sorts [...]

The thought of closing my blog-shop has been hovering around my head for a while and I even had an idea of merging my blog with the photoblog - but the latter turned out to be a not-so-great idea. Using it from version 1.5 (current version 2.2), I have learnt lots & lots of [...]

From my recent ramblings in this part of the e-world, I can convince myself (and hopefully you too) that I had a pretty productive/fruitful trip to Germany - mainly for work (workshop, Blue Gene/L) and needless to say, some extra-curricular activities (Cathedral & Brewing Houses in Cologne, Historic Jülich Citadel and Brown Coal Mining near [...]

Well, so far I have had the feeling that St. Patrick’s Day was just a very valid reason for drinking good beer and lots of it but this time around I realized that it was a friend’s birthday - a big one at that. To keep the story short and make it more interesting, let [...]

I know I have been writing, at least in the last two entries, what might be considered by many as techno crap. Continuing the trend, I changed the OS (the Operating System) in my laptop from you-know-what to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With that, ladies and gentleman, I am very very proud to announce that [...]

OK - only 5 of my 11 picks for the ongoing NFL Playoff season turned out to be right, and more importantly, my favorite team - New England Patriots - played uncharacteristically to loose another Super Bowl appearance. But no regrets - Colts played really really well in the second half to win the game. [...]

What do I want to do during next 365 days? My list has been under preparation for a while - very much expected to grow further and here are some excerpts:

Research, Graduate School, etc.: Have been at Michigan Tech for over four years now - in what has turned out to be the best [...]

It’s that time of the year again… to flashback on what has happened, what went right, what did not, and such… Personally, this has been a wonderful year in many different aspects and not so good in few others. If it’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, the following (though not as [...]

Blue Gene, a massively parallel supercomputer of IBM, occupies as much space as this room [room that we were in, capable of comfortably seating over 500 people], eats about 2MW of power and does only 1015 operations per second. However, each of the human brain in this room occupies about 0.06 cubic feet of space, [...]

Week following my trip to the holy Lambeau Field (Wembley / Lord’s of American Football) was quite hectic. Research work progressed smoothly enough inspite of yet another scheduled power outage, the RAID setup in my server continued to bother me before Thanksgiving break started. Talking about Thanksgiving, this was the first such event in last [...]

Warning
OK, before I go on to write anything about my experience on this day, I am obligated to warn you that the much (or almost all of the material) contained pertains to National Football League (a.k.a. American Football, Pile-Up Game, or whatever else you may know it as…) and that you may not appreciate the [...]

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:

Research: Recent (and frequent) scheduled power outages in the [...]

I am quite sure that you know by now that I received my MacBook Pro (affectionately called My (New) Baby a while ago. I couldn’t be any happier as it was making my life lot more simpler and easier - effortlessly running Photoshop, Firefox, Terminals, Nikon Capture NX, … at the same time (thanks to [...]

After a very blistering start to the regular season, to winning the division with about 15 games left, to loosing the division to the Twins on the last day of regular season, to beating Yankees and Athletics in the first two rounds of MLB PlayOffs, Detroit Tigers had a hell of a season and gave [...]

As you may be aware (from your reading of this entry or otherwise), Dr. Abdul Kalam was in B R Hills recently and interacted with *concerned* folks (folks who are concerned about the sustenance and developement of B R Hills as well as its residents). Yesterday, Kalyan sent me few pictures (that he got from [...]

Kalyan had mentioned that Mr. President (Dr. Abdul Kalam, India) was visiting B R Hills and he (Kalyan) would interact with him (Mr. President) explaining certain things. From his (Kalyan’s) recent blog entry, I do understand that Mr. President, amongst quite many pictures shown to him during the photo exhibition at B R Hills, had [...]

Didn’t I say my friends had been planning for some weekend activities in my last entry? They did and it was fun - Friday evening ride around Lake Linden, dinner in Mings, a game of Cricket in the SDC, Saturday afternoon drive towards Presque Isle (we never made it there due to some technical/mechanical [...]

Didn’t I promise to tell you about some exotic adventure in my previous entry? Hopefully, my narration/description will live upto your expectations - if not, take a tour of these places and you can feel it yourself. BTW, I am looking for a way to generate a map of the route that was followed in [...]

Much of about 36 hours after arriving in US were used, effectively to a certain extent, to get done quite a few things: a short research meeting, working on some SMEAGOL related issues, meeting Dave Tobias for GSC website related work, short stops at MTU Telecom office & Victoria’s Kitchen, a hair cut, Changgong Zhou’s [...]

In A Nutshell…
All in all, although I felt severe shortage of time sometimes, this trip to India was a pretty good one. Attending the Cochin Conference, visiting schools/institutions I studied in, talking to my teachers, hanging out with friends, roaming in/around/outside of Bangalore, seeing places that I had never seen before in my life, seeing [...]

Our trip to BiLigiri Rangana Hills helped improve my health to a significant extent. But staying in Bangalore and roaming around in some awesomely polluted parts promptly did its part and the cough/bad-throat related issues showed no signs of letting go. I was forced to stay at home, much to my mom’s liking - she [...]

It had been a few days since /me arrived in Bangalore from the Cochin Conference and I did catch up with few things - meeting some of my friends, visiting BASE (Bangalore Association for Science Education) wherein I not only had the opportunity to talk to BSS, CVV & HRM (Dr. B S Shylaja, Dr. [...]

Before I go on and write good things, as usual, I must write about bad things. Like I mentioned in my previous entry, all the excitement I had about Bangalore vanished into thin air (or thick smoke, to be precise) within few minutes into the traffic. These certain bad things and some good things need [...]

Yesterday didn’t end till early hours of today and it was about 2.30 am when I got done with few last minute things - checking seating for first leg of the journey in CMX, having my carry-on luggage weighed, packing and re-packing, making sure that I had all the required documents, visiting Qunicy Mine (and [...]

Much of preparations from my side for the upcoming trip to India - tickets, I-94, travel letters, transcripts, proof of Fall semester enrollment, and of course some packing - are done. That leaves me to do one last thing - keep counting days. Less than two and half days to go before first leg of [...]

I had been meaning to write about this for a while but didn’t find a suitable occasion (don’t I always claim so?). Anyway, I got out of bed quite early in the morning (thanks to my new found passion that makes me be at a given place before 8 am), browsed through some usual pages [...]

I did mention in my last week’s entry that our team (in Church as well as Grad leagues) needed to work lot harder (and play lot smarter) to perform better. Being a double-elimination scheme, we lost our second game in the Church league play-offs after a tough fight. Score was 6-7 and it was pretty [...]

Much of what happened during last seven days, barring research related stuff, is worth forgetting - why you ask? Starting with sports for a change, we (Team Fiziks) dropped our last regular season game against ITS. It’s not the loss itself that hurts me (and everyone else on the team) but the manner in which [...]

Well, my blog is kinda becoming a weekly update of things that happened and I am not too happy about it - I would rather write about certain something in great detail than making it look like a Wal*Mart Super Center but it will be a while before I get there. This Wal*Mart approach also [...]

This past weekend, as most of us know, was a long one, the week that followed retained much of the festive atmosphere in the local area - at least to me. Not having team practice sessions and/or games (we struggled quite a bit to get the game reschedule with ME - that’s a whole different [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Since my last b!@#$ing about people (a.k.a. friends) not reading my blog, some of them actually did read (one of them somehow managed to read a two month old entry) and few of them even found enough time to leave comments. Guess I should do it (i.e., b!@#$ing) more often. I have come to realize [...]

Well, two of the three things that were supposed make me better did happen - for last thing, Pistons beating Nets, I might have to wait till Eastern Conference paly-offs. However, there were other things that made up for Pistons’ loss. A short photographic outing in the snow-melting grounds of McLain State Park (you must [...]

Like I mentioned in the previous entry, it took me nearly three days getting back into routine. I spent few hours in writing a very useful script - to prepare initial files for a 231-step calculation. Other scripts I have written so far for this project were simple in the sense that they required either [...]

I had heard about this from Dr. Pushpa Murthy a while ago (when I was flying to Grand Canyon in August 2005) but had never taken enough interest to go and see it myself. After sleeping over the matter for nearly 6 months, I went to Twin Lakes today, for a casual photography ride and [...]

If you did read my previous entry, I had quite a few things on my weekend’s ToDo list - most important being to prepare myself (laptop, camera, lenses, batteries,…) for Saturday’s game. It has been a while since I got out of bed before 6 am on a Saturday and it felt good getting up [...]

Well, thanksgiving break started a week early for me — I was under the impression that it would start from the next week! On Monday, I finished one of the last things with APS March Meeting - Abstract Submission. That’s probably the only thing that went right as Packers lost to Vikings in pretty the [...]

Everytime Phil comes to Houghton, there is usually a camp-fire related party in the wild, adjacent to Tear Lake, and this year was no exception. Compared to last year, this one was much longer and more entertaining. It started off around 6 pm - I went for a walk to take (about 100+) pictures of [...]

Some of us, by which I again mean some softball players, decided to drive upto the Misery Bay on Saturday afternoon : it’s shallow - water doesn’t get above waist level for about 250 ft into the lake, it’s warmer than Calumet and even if the water was cold, there is a river that joins [...]

Some of us, I mean the softball players, decided to go swimming in the Superior (Calumet Water Works) to beat the heat down on this sunny, bright, warm and humid day. Driving into this park from Calumet is a rare treat to the eyes, as one can, if she/he knows what to look for, can [...]

Spring 2005 just ended and it has been a memorable semester for many reasons. I got through the Physics Qualifiers in early January and started working on building a Beowulf linux cluster in our research group; I (actively) participated in (most of the) LUG meetings and Install-A-Thon; attended APS March Meeting in Los Angeles, meeting [...]

I came to school early as we had a meeting planned, but it had to be postponed since the Qual-Committee was meeting in the same room. My nervousness had no upper bound and I grew very restless with time. It was just around 12.30 pm that Dr. P put all my nervousness to rest - [...]

Yesterday got off to a nervous start and I spent much of it in the school (good thing about bad weather was that Dr. Beck’s class was cancelled) - revising and reworking some important problems. I also discussed couple of problems with Tilvi and the examination started off at 7 pm. The questions looked [...]

Dave took me there and it was a very pleasant walk from the entrance to the cabin. Though at first the steps felt a bit heavy, I got used to it soon. Amidst so much fun and frolic, it was hard to realize how I spent nearly 8 hours! I took plenty of pictures as [...]