that week is here

Spring weather continues to keep the days warm and nights cool. wow, we have really been treated with some memorable weeks of near perfect conditions. atleast, the kinds i like. dawn brings new rays of light and Yolanda's phone call woke me up, still overdosed from the 2 days of pure fun and no work ( can u believe the cheek?). she had wonderful things to say. Thank you my dear friend. i really am blessed to have met you.

so with that sprightly start (albeit a little late), the work day started. then jeri emails with even better sounding words ...yea..i save a neat 800 odd $$ as i qualified for the summer tuiton benefit.yipeee...

Bonnie got all of us mini Koalas..from Oz...she of course spoke as the resident expert of marsupials and their habits...wow, that lady has some knowledge about almost everything under the sky and beoynd.

Finally, we get MCR to work for us and she plots out stuff on MATLAB, that were just a treat to watch. another 10 pages of solid info can now go into my thesis.

in all that happiness and feeling of achievement and contentment (trust me to be convinced ASAP) i rushed home to have dosas courtesy last afternoon's potluck..shashi n niti had filled our tummies with masala dosas..we also had sambaar, chutni and gajar halwa and then chai n pakodas..yummm it all was..

so today too the junta was there and we had another round of dosas..yumm yumm

all of us then drove down to CPlaza and had gellato ice creams...man, im seeming to want more of such large group kind of fun , just as i realise its all going to not remain the same for too long...Heku's got that job offfer fron Intel India at Blore...he;s a dude..he deserved that offer.. good luck bro, u make me proud. and then gita is to leave for OR on tuesday. and then i really am not sure where i will be...

oh ok, let me not get into all my theories of despair and sadness associated with separations..

its 2 in the morning..i have to finish this part of my powerpoint for thursday..another long day awaits ahead

catch u then

ughh..why did Agassi have to exit so early?

the beaver-tailed cactus: a native of these parts 

the lull before the storm?

so i turn in a fairly decent draft of my thesis to JSL a whole 73 pages including figures and what not. that was friday afternoon. holding those freshly printed pages felt somewhat like a new parent holds his/ her first born. gues the effort showed somewhere finaly. oh well, lets not cross the bridge before we even get to it. but what the heck, i said, i should treat myself to some long-term (u know the 8 hour kinds) sleep. never quite did that until friday night anyways. had a brief political discussions sesion with Rich in the afternoon, this time it was about the seven sins that humans can ( or do) commit. lust sloth greed gluttony pride anger envy (not necesarily in any order). SUV (or rather SUV driver) bashing is never far especially since both of us have sarcasm to dole out for free , ALWAYS!
he's the Green party peace activist, need i say more? a revolutionary of sorts, i admire his courage to speak out against whatever he thinks to be unfair. ok, back to the topic. so friday night ( and evening - a brief 3 -hr nap from 6 to 9pm) led to saturday's sloth. lunch time just rolls by on such days . hung around with pals at an 'all u can eat' chinese place. didnt quite do justice as i normally do, maybe it was the food ( or the lack of it in the containers) that put me off. each hour i kept pinching myself, dude, u havent defended ure thing succesfully yet, so why this 'ahh! i need a break' attitude? just looked around to find that each one on that lunch table had not any deadline as pressing as mine ( thursday at 10 !) and yet i seemed the most at place with no hurry whatsover. maybe it is the lull b4 the storm, hope it just doesnt blow me away....hee hee

so got back and eventually got to emrl 201..wunder how many more days i can work there? did some extempo fotography of the flower beds close to the library on my way up to the labs.

anyways, now i feel rested enough, if ever that was my reason for slacking away for the past 36 hours now. now i got to read eatough et al's take on PM pollution along the wasatch front, they of course were well endowed to carry out numerous experiments unlike us.

during my brief honemoon, i also managed to read the usual big names in indian media TOI, I-express. some good stuff wrt our new PM.

i particularly liked when SWAMINATHAN S ANKLESARIA AIYAR (A secular triumph after all )asked if it was possible for an american arab to get to a top position in the US govt..he was maybe trying to comapre the case of how sikhs were just 20 yrs ago the target of some vicious and horrible backlash in some parts of the country after Mrs G's assasination. and the then Congress wasnt all that uninvoled in that sad episode.

also chindanand mentioned here (From feel good to feel better ): a quote from a US daily : "While more than 100,000 American and other troops were splashing around Iraq ostensibly to create a democracy...a Hindu-Muslim nation of more than one billion people was actually committing democracy."
just renews some faith, not that i had lost it , mind u!

just more pleased to be an indian when people come up and ask about the elections and its nevr expected results.

looking north west from the MEB parking lot. those brief moments between two worlds 

smells like green spirit

so prasanna comes knocking to discuss the developments what with Sonia refusing the PM's post. he believes it is a wise move on her part and that leaves her on a higher moral ground than before. As always, when we get together to chant politics, one topic leads to the other and this time it led to lunch and coffee as well! he, somewhat like me, still has to develop a recurring ideology of his own. I admit ot being left of center and liberal to go with it, but do not discount capitalism altogether as well. prasanna went on to narrate how he has gotten into reading about the history of india and how religions have made their way to waht they are today. so that should be interesting as to what he makes of that string of thought. passionate as he is, and i apprecaite that in him a lot, he suggested we (him me and Minal, for starters) should seriously give a thought at forming a more oragnised platform to address the multitude of concerns (education, environment, poverty, and more) which we always end up discussing about anyways. some more excahnge of ideas led to him proposing that we could maybe focus on the plight of national parks in India. Wow! that spelt action to me. those treasures of our land deserve more than they are being treated to nowadays. Quickly i started to formulate an action plan and he chipped in with his plans (or intended plans) . man, i love such a passionate jugalbandi of ideas. I am really keen on following this up with him and Minal. its a project I am so willing to dive into. already my mind is buzzing with ideas from marketing to simple web-searches to even documentation. thers going to be tons to work on. so for now,( given that I am 8 days away from my masters thesis defense (yea!) and other commitments) we shall meet the 1st weekend in June to kick off our efforts. i see a lot of fun in doing this. ok more on my ideas for our project in later posts. back to PCA on MATLAB now. tch tch.

A TEXT from Chirag

yipeee...i know its too early for me, but never did manage to sit up late last nite working on that yellowstone data. that means today is a looong day, well everyday has been so for the past month now.
and a great news to start the day. in fact thats what woke me up. i get a text message from Chirag, saying he's got a B1 visa to come to the US. man, that rocks! he definitely was at it all this while...good dividends eventaully!. welcome aboard Chirag. but he never mentioned when and where. should call him up someday..that is if he still uses tht cell ## of his. now on to breakfast and then the 9:24 to the engineering building.

Spring in Salt Lake

. looking south east from the socce field...now that the kind of weather is what i am really missing ..pity that i cannot stay outdoors for longer than just clicking this snap.
 

those first steps

i had to start somewhere, so here goes.
credits are due to the deserving. Antara Datta. she doesnt know me, of course neither do I know her. i got into this blogger mode of mine because i happened to land at her blogspot at:

Indian Politics

not too sure what my blogspot will list each time, but politics will feature for sure. and then why are you reading all this anyways? dont you have better to do?
ok, so i shudnt be too sarcastic right at the beginning. dont mean to piss people away.

me defends my master's thesis in a week and few days and its so like me to get into blogging right when i shuld not be thinking of anyhting other than mass spectra from air particles collected during last summer's wildfires here in Utah.

someday i shall detail the work, for the ones who care to bother.
ok, back to chapter 5 on MS word. somebody said to me yesterday: " why didnt u use Latex for typing your work?" a tad too late now na?

for the ones like me who peek into others personal webpages, here's mine:
my homepage

so long