Many days it has been since this was updated, and while I cannot honestly use being excessively busy as an excuse for my absence, in some ways it was being busy without working which indeed kept me away. If I have had one really productive day since I last wrote, it has to be yesterday, when I did get a major chunk of work done at night, I guess I have grown lazy since I last wrote, and things have been strange. Let’s see, when I last left this blog I was nearing the end of my stay at Park City, and I figure it was right as I had two really cool lectures left, and other such things. Those came to pass, and the 3 days of flight happened to be upon me, the day before I actually flew out, or rather in a more accurate sense, the midnight of the day I flew out was occupied by such activities as acquiring the new Harry Potter (I flew out on the same day as it was released), attending parties for the release, and hitting up Java Cow one last time. I must express my love for Cows ice cream, and the Java Cow place on Main St, at Park City, it probably is the only thing at Park City that I shall truly miss, and I am forced to admit that the Canucks seem to have bloody good ice cream. It is interesting to note however that I don’t find this in the slightest bit strange, something I could probably attribute to this past year, seeing as before then I remember people not buying ice cream, and a subsequent noticeable drop in ice cream availability during the “winters” in Delhi, and to think of it Delhi doesn’t really get that cold.

Subsequently post Park City I have gotten back to Delhi, and contrary to suggestions from certain quarters, I am not engaged in, or even planning on engaging myself in any acts involving cattle and such things. Delhi’s been pretty OK so far, it has been hot for the most part of it, and well I took a week off from Delhi to go off to Orissa, there really isn’t much to write about from Orissa, I saw a few cool places, and had some really good food, though it still doesn’t match places like the Andamans on the food front, I guess sea food, despite the fact that it is on the coast, is not Orissa’s forte/is expensive/is not eaten by people unless special occasions arise/... It was intriguing in other ways, I guess I have done a good job of staying away from that one place for a really long time, or well to be more accurate, my parents have been indulgent with my requests not go there, and I guess now that I’ve been there once, I really don’t plan on going back for a long time, as someone I know put it, the world’s still out there waiting to be explored. Delhi’s sort of lonely though, so far I can count on having called four people at most, one of them doesn’t live here, and is merely visiting for a week or so, and the other two have been around, I still haven’t hung out with people I usually hangout with when I am in Delhi, and said people are currently busy, which makes absolute sense, but is at the same time not conducive to the entire notion of hanging out. Well the food’s been good, not eating at Subways everyday is a good thing, I guess, and it is kind of nice to have two refrigerators full of food just lying there, though I guess my snack coffers are still as empty as they usually are. I also ended up going to school, my first trip back since I went to Brown, and I guess it’s still there, but it has lost its novelty, its not the place I used to spend whole days at, and the only reason I have been really about going to school this time round is because of the people I knew in there, and even they are fast disappearing. It is interesting though, I have gotten over a lot of what school was, I love Brown now, nearly everyone I know is at Brown, and being back at school isn’t as exciting as it once was, I loved being at school through 2003, even after I had graduated, it was probably the closest thing to a second home I had at that time, and now it is just there, it is in my past, left there to never be forgotten, and a part of me, but not something that I really miss or anything. Exun however is a completely different matter, and I guess I was back at school because of Exun, and we had this little (like it was tiny compared to some of the things I have done before) programming thingamajig, telling people about recursion and DP, and trying to inspire some ideas, and I guess I noticed quite a few anomalies between how me and IB used to do it before and how we did it now. For one, because of our own divergent reasons, a lot of our explanations involved not talking about the code part of it worked, in fact if it wasn’t IB, I had this entire grand plan about not writing a single line of code through the recursion part of it, but between Azgez and IB we kind of had to write code. I am however not entirely sure about how I’d deal with this if I had to do it again, I can still write C code, it’s not even hard to do, it’s just that between MATLAB and all the Scheme and OCaml I did last year, and all of the being annoyed over Java has really turned me into not liking what I did all through school that much anymore, and I guess I was just weirded out by some of the things I was doing, and I guess I managed to freak a fair number of people out. Pizza Hut has grow more expensive, and that’s a weird thing, their pizzas really haven’t improved, they need to learn from Antonio’s even, and Antonio’s isn’t even close to the best pizza I have ever eaten (that was thanks to NTM in the city).

Other than sleeping, eating, and watching copious amounts of television (it hasn’t improved, it has gotten worse, I have little else to do), I have been writing e-mails and reading papers, which contrary to how it may sound is pretty exciting, and I ran into this really cool thing yesterday, which had me all excited, and I have a mail from R of R&N (the book) fame, and I am kind of pleased about that, like it’s really cool and all, and I guess the research is beginning to sound like more fun, even though I am hopelessly lost trying to figure out how Expectation Maximization works and about all those things I missed while I was lazing around in Delhi/Orissa, I kind of which I had my copy of R&N with me, though between the 6 books I am definitely carrying back, and the 3 or so others I plan on fitting in if I have space, I don’t think bringing R&N would have been a really good idea.

Ooh things to appreciate, I forgot to ever mention that while I was dreading the entire act of American Air from Boston to London/Heathrow, I really really loved AA, it is the best airline I have been in so far, and the 777’s they fly are majestic, they have absolutely gargantuan seats, the in-flight entertainment is good in an extremely non-sucky way, the food is good, and the people on it are really really good, and if it wasn’t in the red whenever news about its financial status seeps through, I would make an effort to fly them wherever I could. Then of course of CNET’s shenanigans in response to their 10^th anniversary/birthday, and I guess I really like the The Top 10 Tech We Miss list, though I wish I had had more direct experience with a Newton, I have heard a lot about it, though I have never really seen one.

Less than 3 weeks to Providence, that’s worth looking forward to, yay.

Ze Panda