Tagged: daily

Another long day


As the quarter comes to and end, the effective duration of the days tends to infinity! :-D

For the first time in the quarter I didn’t read a paper properly for Alex’s class. Actually I completely forgot about the paper yesterday and it came to my head just as I tucking into bed late last night. Then today morning I got help up due to various things and reached school at around noon.

Even after that I wasn’t able to concentrate on the paper, because I started playing around with Apache 2 and then ended up wasting a lot of time trying to setup PHP and Perl with it! Sheesh!!!

Anyways, now that thats out of the way, I can atleast focus on the more important things. I’m finally beginning to get a hang of what direction should things take for the project for Alex’s class. Basically we’re trying to validate Modelnet, but at the same time I’m also hoping to develop some tools and scripts which will prove to be useful later on as well.

I’ve to do a lot of work for the bio project as well, but somehow it just isn’t happening. Even Pavel doesn’t know the answer to most of my questions. The algorithm is still unfinished, I have no data sets to test it on, I don’t know how to validate it. Basically, its a gloomy picture. The only good thing is that hopefully I won’t have to make a terribly long presentation on it!

Off to bed for now

The evil of procastrination


I guess without doubt the greatest evil that a grad student is faced with is procastrination. I mean, here I am, with a week to go for the quarter, and struggling with both my courses. Where I should have been comfortably making presentations and reports. Not that I couldn’t have, but just that I haven’t. All due to procastrination. Not that I have anyone else but me to blame, but the temptation to wile away time doing useless things is just irresistible.

I’ve decided that today I will try to finish as much of the bio project as possible, and I will leave it at that. Because I really need to get working on the presentation, as well as finish work for other project. Besides, the bio class is just a breadth course, and so long as Pavel is not complaining, I don’t have much to lose. Anyways, we’ll see how it goes. I also booked my tickets for home today. So thats a good thing. But somehow I’m not feeling so good about is as I should be. I guess its just the end quarter slump effect. Hopefully in two weeks I will be jumping around happily and shopping and preparing for the trip home :)

Sunday blues


Why are they called sunday blues? Why not monday blues or tuesday blues? What is it about sundays? I guess for most part, its the sinking feeling that monday is almost there already!

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s cabinet was announced today. Mostly expected, with a few surprises and a few expected disasters. Laloo Prasad Yadav got railways, god help us! Shivraj Patil got Home, even though he lost his Lok Sabha seat.

Again, I wasted most of the day chatting and sleeping. But I did make significant progress for the bio project, and am trying to read DS paper and also work on DS project. But it just sounds like I did a lot, I haven’t though.

Right now, off to Chipotle, batter Potle! :-D

Simply talking


Wednesdays are always long, nice, and talkitive. Morning usually go away in talks and syslunch. I have a meeting with Amin right after syslunch. Then afternoons are just catching up with the day, hallway chats and lab discussions. Then I have to stick around on campus till 7 for the computational biology class. That ends at 8:20, by when I’m already half asleep. Then its also my cooking turn on wednesdays :( And to top it all off, usually I’ve to read up a paper for Alex’s class on thursday after that. Beat that!

In other news, vote counting is underway for this year’s general elections in India. The might US of A couldn’t pull of electronic voting in more than a few states, and the massive India, world’s largest democracy easily smoothed into electronic voting/counting without raising a brow. No hue and cry. No nasty hacks. Zilch! I was amazed to say the least. I don’t know how they pulled it off. As Mac said, probably its becoz the results are going to be rigged either way, so it doesn’t matter all that much :-D

But even more surprising is the fact that Congress has a clear lead this time!! So the future is really uncertain. One can’t but wonder that if the Congress + allies does come into power, will they be able to carry on the momentum of IT and outsourcing that the NDA goverment had been able to build up over the last few years. The economic ramifications of this election could be massive. Investors might become sceptic, policies may change. Time will tell. Wait and watch.

busy bee…


The last few days were quite busy, and happening to say the least. I spent the weekend coding the SFS assignment for the distributed systems class. Actually it didn’t turn out to be all that hard. I mean sure it was difficult, but most of the difficulty was because I procastrinated for so long! :-D The assignment itself was quite straight forward, barring a few issues. And in the end, it was really cool to see the code actually running. And then I could brag around (say what, I made a distributed file system, beat that!)

This was on Monday. I had the DS mid-term coming up on tuesday, but for the past week I had been having this incredible urge to move over to Debian that I just couldn’t stand it any more and I thought, what the hell, its only going to take a few hours at most. Although it didn’t turn out to be quite that way, I did make the move to Debian that day itself, and I’m really glad that I did. Within a few hours I was up and running with all the customizations I had earlier (including my own custom compiled kernel!). I’m really loving Debian!

Tuesday morning was frantic study for the mid-term. The mid-term was really cute, though I messed up one easy question. But it was open notes, and you could work it out if you listened in the class and/or read the papers thoroughly. And the questions were precise, there were no “there-is-no-right-or-wrong” type of questions in this paper! But now I have a lot of catching up to do. Research has taken a back seat, and so has the computational biology project. I hope to fire back on both of them starting tomorrow. High hopes I know, but we’ll soon find out. Right now I’m worried about what I’m going to say in the meetings tomorrow….