notes to self

so here we are, (i am, the dilemma continues) three weeks from the last post. or was it more? indeed lost for all sense in time. wait lemme check.. ok so its 4 weeks.. ie the 6th week of spring is just about to begin.. and im no further than i was all that time back..

i dont know what i am trying to do.. reminds me of an older post i had in another blog altogether.. i dont feel like iterating myself.

and even though at this time writing the remainder of this post feels unimportant, irrelevant and inconsequential i will complete what i set out to do all those weeks ago.. use the notes i prepared for this blog.. i will use quotes at this time because i feel its not me who wants to say these things.. that is another issue i wanted to talk about.. the "its not me" feeling.. and as im about to type the rest of this sentence i recall another post in the same distant blog.. this time i will iterate myself. it feels like saying it out loud will make me more interesting or give me self-importance but i have diagnosed or prognosed myself as schizophrenic.. and THERE is the topic for my next post.. no one knows when that will come about..

but back to this post

so ever since i have set foot in this soil (defined Rochester) i have had to deal with a new culture altogether.. i will not call it a 'culture-shock' im not sure if it comes close even.
its just everything is different here apart from the obvious things like left hand drive and upside down switches and left hand flushes (amusingly recalled elsewhere).. not to forget snow.. in april even.

lets begin with the climate.. or seasons.. by now i have witnessed three of the seasons.. and experienced them like never before.. leaves falling by the tonnes in fall.. snow falling by the gazillion tonnes in winter.. and now the onset of spring.. its like how i read about in books or saw in movies.. the colours of autumn with the myriad shades of the leaves the brave ones on the trees and the resigned ones on the grass.. the use of leaf blowers by men to deal with this calamity of sorts.. the piles of leaves after they were done.. the urge to jump into them like calvin.. then after even the brave ones have fallen.. the snow.. light at first but then mid january the mountains.. sheer mountains of snow lining every road and parking lot.. snow knee deep where there was once flourishing grass everywhere.. again the urge to play and indeed acting on the urge.. playing in it with the pain of frozen hands later.. skating on ice.. skiing down hillsides.. all undreamt of in a land far away.. the cold.. the sheer cold.. the heaters in houses, college buildings and buses.. in cars and eateries..

(to be continued)

seven months and none too soon

so here i am sitting on Rosita, a name coined by one mihir chitnis for the comfortable lazyboy sitting in my room at crittenden road. sitting here at 8 in the morning after a rather long night which brings in the second monday of the new spring quarter. during the course of this night i have seen a movie downloaded earlier on sunday from the rit hub, seen an episode of jimmy fallon (the newest - 10th) on hulu, changed my personal website that i maintain on the rit network, checked emails, cleaned up my windows vista desktop for the first time which was increasingly looking like my room just before laundry day, (first time because i have generally refrained from using windows over the last seven months, becoming a solid fedora linux user- switching back to windows as the version of matlab that i have obtained is for windows :| ) solved one part of a simple first assignment in one of my courses, Computer Vision, made tea, devoured a light breakfast and chatted with an old friend nisarg who introduced me to a budding rit student (unlikely from our first few exchanges).. all in all a very relaxed night.

this night as defined in the paragraph above effectively began as soon as i stepped into my house after returning from a generally worthless visit to rit on a sunday. but on my way back in the bus i concretely decided to restart this blog and made notes on my phone which i will use in a few minutes to regurgitate into this entry. well restarting this blog has been on the back of my mind since a very long time.. infact i never remember having lost track of the need to do so. always small incidents occur in life here which make me want to record them but the urge is just too weak to do anything bout it. more than once i have furtively visited this page and run away from it. in the last few weeks however this urge has been stronger and the reasons to not do so have been weaker.
also a stimulus (much overused a word here in the us nowadays) from ashwin moved me along further towards this end.

i thought that i might recap the last seven months here as a beginning. there would obviously be a lot of data i could put down in words right. but the right things just never come to mind. here is an honest attempt though.. not a recap in the true sense of the word as well.. or hell maybe it is..

lets begin where we left of. i have registered for courses and the fall quarter begins. three courses and two jobs fill up my schedule. mondays and wednesdays i have the course lectures and tuesdays and thursdays i perform inhuman feats of slicing and weighing up produce of field and farm in the backrooms of the ritz sportszone along with becoming increasingly adept at rolling out burritos, sub sandwiches, burgers and paninis at a high rate.

the courses are not too demanding infact one may go as far as saying they are a cake walk. thus i concentrate on earning and spending and solving a few assignments as they come assisted by or rather assisting a karthik prabhu in one of them. the programming is manageable and after an early setback everything runs smooth. a very orgainsed quarter. very algorithmic.. but in all of this quarter i barely set foot in the CS department proper apart from courses which run 6 hours straight. thus i dont get a chance to interact with many ppl.. seniors and peers included. the quarter ends happily in november with grades above expectations.
we witness our first snow in the bargain and bid farewell to the sun and leaves and any shade of green in the environment. midway through the quarter also decide to visit india in the near future.

the second quarter begins with the heart in a hurry.. i have endeavoured to take up a course i have no clue about. grid computing. i find out that even the professor expects us to find out what it is. an experience unlike any other i have ever had.
coupled with distributed and algorithms the perfect mixture for a tragedy is set up.

but this time around i find two partners in crime. this develops from what i remember as one breakfast on the last day of the previous quarter.

the quarter gets underway in full flow.. i have no clue about the juggernaut that is about to come hurtling in my direction. i stand there like a frozen doe in the headlights.. assignments and research papers flying past me thick and fast.. i try to duck and avoid.. a most foolish thing to do.. and at the most inappropriate time i flee.. to india.

the sojourn is really welcome.. its nice to be back in a place u can truly relate to.. sit on the same seats that were well acquainted with your backside once.. visits the good old places that you would frequent when you were king.. but something is very different.. very wrong.. in the heart of hearts you realise it.. the same bed doesnt comfort you like before.. the tv sends out weird rays.. home.. its the same but it looks different.. smells different.. yes indeed it does.. not metaphorically even! u remember what is waiting for you back here.. u are truly stuck between two timezones.. and i dont mean jet lag.. u know you have to go back and its killing you in two ways.. one u have to go back! and two you have to go back! the first refering to leaving the now-pseudo comforts of home and going back to find that the juggernaut earlier referred to is already over your jugular.. and the other refers to wanting to go back as soon as possible.. which completely does not make sense!

but anyway im back and thankfully i am given the oppurtunity to meet jay.. a welcome face after so long! again it feels like things would have changed but it appears as if they have not.. good times for a couple of days.. forget about the gloom im going back to.. the cold is welcome too.. not that i was ever uncomfortable in india but this just feels must better.

and then i return. the room looks just the same and barely 5 hours after i reach the house i make my way to college to face anarchy.. things have gone out of control in just the one week i missed.. all sorts of stuff is due at really short notice.. nowhere to run. finally after struggling for 2 weeks i give up. i look for a fresh start but the oppurtunity is denied to me.. i will not explain that here.

then it begins - three of us cast our lot in together. mihir, ramesh muraleedharan and me. spend hours and hours doing random useful and useless things together. staying up all nite at various venues becomes a part of our schedule. sleep becomes an unknown and valued quantity. u can find us vaguely catching forty winks in front of a variety of computers in a variety of labs.

the projects mount. teams are formed. pressure from all around. meet today evening for this. research on that. why havent you written this yet. its due tomoro. when are you free tomoro. we have to do this asap. presentations. professors. papers. projects. programs. plagiarism(*). all start doing circles round me head. cant concentrate qualitatively on any. jobs are dropped due to lack of time. money flow inwards is cut. money flow outward doubles. still no sleep. life in retrospect is in fast forward but each moment passes as slow as it excruciatingly can. one by one projects are tackled, presentations are improvised, bluffed, papers are written. no overall picture can be obtained.. its like a processor with an overflowing queue with the most urgent job being attended to at the expense of others. there is no order. no algorithm. just a pure mashup. pure frustration. i depend heavily on others to bail me out at many times. thankfully they come to the rescue. prithvi, manoj, mihir, anoop. roommates are forgotten. cant remember when i last saw them. life becomes a slow mesmerising dance around teh third level of the golisano college and around bus schedules. physical strenght and mental strength go for a toss.. all looks lost.

somehow we manage to pull through to the last week. almost all work done.. infact done just a few countable hours before our first exam. the exams come and go. no clue what happened to them. for some reason one of the answers is a "dry vodka martini". and then its over. the quarter is over after 11+ weeks of work in a 10 week quarter.
i need to blame this dismal failure on something, someone. trip to india is not fair. myself is not fair. even this will not allow me peace.

finally the results come. horrific but no damage done. somehow we survive with only bruises. nothing broken. except spirit maybe.

but there is one week to recover. spring break. try to forget the pain of the previous months i try. and by the end of the week. am almost successful. that is when the spring quarter begins. and this is the second week coming up.

i just realised that i have come to the rightful end of this piece and i still have not touched my phone to splatter any of my notes over this blog yet.
for another day then.

this has been my 7 months so far.. well summararily atleast.. hopefully i may yet add some details to future entries. its now 10am 2 hours since i sat down on this. and have to leave for a substitute shift i have today.

Computer Science

today i finally registered for classes

and started the registered the laptop in teh RIT network as well, its first look at daylight..

a day of starts

it started off with me snoozing the alarm like 15 times and even then oversleeping
i thought i'd missed the only bus which would get me there on time but luckily after a hush hush job somehow i managed to catch it with what seemed like half the indian community at rustic village.

reached college at 0901

signed up for CS orientation where The professor HPBischoff confirmed all the rumours we were hearing from our seniors ;)

then after a very strange and heavy fully vegetarian lunch we set off for the CS building for registration of courses..
somewhere along the way and during the extended wait in line i decided the courses i would take in the first quarter.

and a few minutes later the laptop too got magically registered and working..
and then this.

it has been a hell of a 18 days in the US of A so far.. thouroughly enjoyable and i suppose i can now say that the feeling of being a tourist is slowly wearing away and more and more i feel liike a student..

one fear still plagues me
until a few days back i felt really keyed up to start studying here and was hoping to do well
but then recently ive discovered that this feeling is no different to the ones i would have at the beginning of each engineering semester anyway
in fact after seeing the way other students suck up to the professors in RIT its hard to believe that academically this is going to be any different than frcrce..

i just hope that the fairness and equality for all factor kicks in here in the US

what else..

where do i begin to describe the fun ive had the last couple and a half weeks..
i guess that will go down forever undocumented.. and so be it.. but i hope the memories live on forever..

anyway goodluck and goodnight..

day one of blogging

sunday: [is that all his family?]
--dorney park--



tuesday: [a big apple a day]
i'm saying this now and i will say it again repeatedly
i cannot begin to describe the merriment i have come to experience over the last week or two

here is a brief photo blog



z

heres how it happened

well it was always a UF v RIT battle..

and UF had a lot of things going for it..

i stuck my neck out with RIT.. much to everyone's bewilderment(i like doing that)..

amey and co. (basically a majority of comps a) have decided to go to UF and have already gotten their stuff complete..
akoy was going to OSU
jay to Case Western Reserve which sounded brilliant the way he described it
minita is going to Columbia U(NY)
nilay to NEU (rotten shit (not nilay))

then there came a time when i was fixed in the head that RIT was it for me..
then finally one day before i applied for the visa interview i felt the foundations of my belief shaking..
but still.. i stuck on..
now it was finalised when i drew up the paperwork for the visa application..

the next day just browsing through the documents i'd received from the universities i found out much to my surprise and a fleeting moment of dismay that UMASS Dartmouth had offered me a complete tuition waiver and a $6250 Teaching Assistanship for 10 hours a week.. which basically meant they were paying me to attend their college..

but i looked beyond it..

at the RIT meet i'd come to know quite a few people i'd be attending college with..
notably one Nayan B and a Rahul Z.. nice blokes.. hopefully things will work out well with them when it comes to housing and stuff..

then as the interview date approached things started to get a little edgy.. with random documents wishing to disappear at the wrong times and all.. finally a couple of days before the interview.. there was a mock interview conducted.. which i screwed up majorly.. sticking to the truth apparently was not a good idea.. this added tremendously to the nerves.. so with mental notes taken down i took one more the next day.. this one went off very smoothly.. and the confidence level went up a few notches.. yet nerves were still there.. there was a feeling that something would give.. and things mite go wrong..

then the day of the interview i entered the application office pretty much caught in between being a nervous wreck and being indifferent to the outcome.. then something changed.. as it has happened a few times before..

things became calm and it felt asif i belonged to the moment.. (drama ;))

and it comes to life

after four months..

today i finally received a students visa after the most uniquely interesting visa interview story i've heard so far..

incase u need to catch up..

i'm heading for Rochester Institute of Technology.

its been a brilliant journey so far and without sounding well.. without sounding..

only i know how magnificently things have fallen into place over the course of the last year to get me to where i am now..

realistically speaking last march (07) i had no clue as to what i would be doing next..
i could have chosen any field i wanted.. MBS thru CAT was an option..

one counseling session with a certain Madhavi Desai changed everything.. and the rest.. well is the rest..

and today as this blog comes to a renewed life..

cheers!

and thus it ended..

NeU and UIC rejects
well the decisions were out a long time back but just happened to check them today!

now its only RIT v UF

RIT requires me to send them a resume for me to be considered for graduate assistantship.. which i plan to do today..