Tagged: daily

My typical day


I will write up a more detailed schedule soon, but here’s what a typical day for me looks like:

* get up at around 9
* get ready and leave for school by 10
* reach and settle down in the lab by 11
* try to get some work done before other distractions like lunch hit in
* usually there is some talk to go to either pre-lunch or post-lunch. If not talk, then there’s usually a meeting. If neither, then usually there’s some amount of time spent in general discussions with lab mates
* I start getting touchy as the clock reaches 5. I start itching for home. I can’t seem to work late in the lab, perhaps because I’m not on campus. Sometimes I come back in, but thats rare
* Get back home by 6
* Go to the fitness center, waste some time reading news and stuff. This usually makes it 8
* Do some work/reading before dinner
* Dinner and post dinner time pass makes it 10 or so
* Some more work/reading between 11 and 1 interspersed with an episode of Batman/Scrubs/SATC/something!!
* After some, non-academic reading and more time wasting on the laptop
* Sleep by 3

Apple’s new toys


Everyone’s raving about Apple’s new toys — the [[http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle|Apple iPod-Flash]] and the [[http://www.apple.com/macmini/|Apple Mac-Mini]]. My reaction? Big deal.

The mini is probably a good idea — atleast now people can plug in their own monitors and keyboards and save up a lot on the crappy keyboards that Apple ships (the monitors are great, but still expensive IMHO).

The iPod shuffle is reasonably priced and stylish, but if I’m getting 20Gig upwards for 100-200 bucks more, why wouldn’t I got for it? Also, I don’t think its a good idea to tie the iPod flash so closely to the iTunes software… I mean, I should always be able to use it as a USB key right?

Work was slow today (read no new progress). Our machine room A/C crashed so a lot of my machines had to be taken down and so I’m stuck without any machines to run my stuff on. Besides, I don’t have any new leads on how to solve my current problem either. Its highly unlikely that we’ll have the requisite work done before the paper deadline, but still there’s no harm in trying.

I also spent some time thinking about designing my own wordpress theme. Played around with Inkscape and Scribus a bit. Also installed Drupal and playing around with it. I think there’s a niche for a personal website management system — which would combine a blog, a photo gallery and static content creation all rolled into one.

Visa trip to LA


Yesterday I went to LA to get my Visa for the Netherlands. The day just flew by, and I was dead tired by the time I got back. But it was an interesting trip nonetheless.

For one, I really really regretted not having a license or even knowing how to drive properly for the first time during my stay in the US. If I had a car, it would have been such a hassle-free task. But without the car, it was a major PITA.

I had to get up at 5 in the morning. Shave and bathe, and bother a good friend to get up and drop me off at the Greyhound stop in downtown San Diego. I was surprised to find that the bus was late, and even more surprised to see that everyone took is so coolly. I was expecting someone to come up and shout threats to sue Greyhound, but nothing even remotely like that happened. The scheduled arrival time in LA was 9, but the driver and everyone else just took it for granted that this was a flexible deadline depending on the traffic conditions. I had not expected such a indifferent attitude from the Americans.

Finally, after much chugging along, I reached LA at around 10. Thinking that the bus might take too long to get me to the embassy, I risked taking a cab. My first in the US. Big mistake. Big big mistake. Let me put it this way — it cost me **twice** as much to get from the LA Greyhound bus terminal to the Netherlands embassy as it cost me for the **return** trip from San Diego to LA and back. Beat that!

The embassy was mostly empty, and the application process hardly took more than 10 minutes. They said they’d FedEx the stamped passport to me early next week, so I should be all set for my trip well in time. On the way back from the Embassy, I decided to take the bus (naturally). Much to my chagrin, I realized that taking the bus on the wayward journey would have been a much better idea — it would have cost me all of 3 bucks for a whole day Metro pass, and since the Embassy was empty anyways, there wasn’t really any rush.

Anyways, I got back to the bus station by 12:45. I had a ticket for the 4pm bus back, but I requested them to put me on an earlier bus and luckily I got a place on the 1pm bus itself. The traffic was worse this time, and by the time I reached SD it was already 5.

The heat is on


Just came into the lab. Read some disturbing news, both on the national front and the US front (national == India) It seems that the ceasefire between India and Pakistan has ended, as the countries exchange fire on the LoC. Ironically, this comes on the eve of the crucial Siachen peace talks, [[http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/804252.cms|ToI reports]].

Meanwhile, the much hyped Google IPO seems to be landing into some trouble. News.com is running a whole [[http://news.com.com/Getting+jittery+over+Google/2009-1030-5298699.html?part=dht&tag=ntop|bunch of stories]] on the controversy surrounding the Google IPO. Google [[http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/20040805-4074.html|has admitted]] to a stock goofup — the company has been (allegedly) giving out stock to its employees for quite some time, but failed to register them. This could shake Google’s credibility and dampen the investor enthusiasm so far.

Birthday bash


Yesterday was yet another birthday bash. Ragesh this time. Poor guy got GPLed not once, not twice, but **thrice** in a night! After much digging we managed to get a plain, vanilla cake for him with no chocolate at all. The cake looked really beautiful, but sadly it didn’t taste as good. Well, as long as Ragsy can finish it off, I don’t really care.

We are having the real party tonight — everyone figured friday night much batter than thursday night for a party. We also have the AIGS movie show tonight — they’re showing Angoor. I’m not sure if I’m gonna go, I’ve already seen Angoor many times, and they’re charging 10 bucks for it! :-O

This whole week has been more or less non-productive. Well of course the paper got accepted, and I’ve been spending most of my time last few days getting the camera ready version ready. However, I could have got some more work done had our NFS server not crashed. Well the problem was much worse, and the timing could not have been better.

See this week we had three deadlines — MASCOTS, WORLDS, and HotNets. Now the service contract for the RAID array of our NFS server expired on July 31st. On August 3rd, the RAID controller of our server crashed, and since the service contract had expired, the company said that they won’t be able to provide 24/7 support or even an instant replacement. So there we were, paper deadlines looking, with nothing better to do than to wait.

The CSEHelp team along with the sysadmin’s really pulled off an amazing feat in the next few days. They started off by restoring the web pages and the project CVSes. Next in line were the critical home directories (and mine was one of the first to be restored B-) :D ). Its only when something like this happens that you realize the importance of all those big sounding words like reliability and availibility and fault tolerance and resilience to failures.