Woke up early today...

The weather was fantastic yet again, with a drizzle yesterday and the temperature at a comfortable 2'C, and I wasn't in the mood to go to office and log on to gtalk yet again, or play TT with Zhongtao and Rajeev yet again, or think more about the project at hand yet again.... I wished for a change - I had reached this stage where I long to work - I have had enough of vacationing. And there I was, walking in at 11 am as always to the same old desk and to the same old PC...

Today was different though - lost all charm in gtalk very soon after Bhatni logged on and we had a fight (well, we have several of those - no big deal). So I was left with nothing much to do - gtalk is most of what I do anyways - and was thanking God for giving me more time to kill watching other people happily working. Then Sylvia walked in and said our idea may not be as good as we are expecting it to be (wow, thank you very much again God! Now that's called icing on top of a cake!) She said we have to see if there is any improvement in the spread in the frequency distribution by using our approach. Well, this was enough for me. I said why not write a MATLAB code or something and actually estimate some values and test out the spread for those. So we sat down and worked out approximations for our variables, and I began with a MATLAB code to test this out. Wow! I was actually doing something constructive after so many days - true there was all the analysis and all that we did - but getting to do something in practice is something that I was looking forward to. After many attempts at debugging and playing around with variables, we finally concluded that our approach is quite good - at least that's what the code suggested. Our approach gave us an almost 3 times improvement in reducing the frequency variation - which is good enough for us.

Happy at our achievement, we decided to call it a day (at 1pm => I worked for just 2 hours today :P) So we were left with pretty much nothing to do - gtalk too didn't look as charming as it used to be. So we set out for a walk in campus; we also had to go to the Clarke hall to get a printout of a poster that the group is to present as a part of an annual presentation on Monday. So there we were, discussing the education system back in India and China, moving on to the EDS meeting and free lunch tomorrow (:P), why ECE sucks and why we suck even more for choosing it and so on... finally went to the printer room, where we had a tough time printing out the 52"x38" poster - you see, the printer had a mind of its own - and it was quite a moody printer. It fell off to sleep in the middle of printing another chap's poster (who was there before us). Quite reluctantly it woke up when we started pushing all its buttons and sluggishly completed the remaining job. When it was our turn, the printer decided to play a little prank and started overlapping some sections of our poster onto others. When we gave the job for printing again, the printer decided it had had enough for the day and shut itself down. I pressed the power button to wake it up, and it took a good ten minutes to warm up - it was pushing out a sheet of paper and drawing it in several times (the screen on that thing told me that it was 'Initializing' - initializing for what on earth? by pushing a sheet in and out??) Anyways, it finally decided it had enough fun and completed our job - a simple job of printing a poster takes exactly an hour in this technologically advanced place (:P). So we took our poster and returned to the office at about 4. Back here, there was a heated discussion going on between Zhongtao and Tony on whom do you choose when it comes to choosing between your mom and wife. Mustansir and Eugene were active listeners and Rajeev and Xiao were, lets say, passive onlookers. We enjoyed their debate too for quite some time, and then Rajeev, Xiao, Sylvia and me started debating on whether its correct to sacrifice one's good for the betterment of many others or should one care for oneself first (Results shall not be disclosed :P) The other discussion now had moved on to religious beliefs and Tony was speaking on Christianity and how we often misinterpret it - was an eyeopener for me - I was amazed at how wrongly I had thought of Christianity till now. Mustansir was talking about the wrong interpretations that many people give to the teachings of Islam, and Eugene was commenting on Buddhism. Mustansir also spoke on Hinduism, but was unaware of why the Cow is respected a lot in Hinduism - I had to chip in with that part. After all this, we were totally uninterested in working any more. So I left office at 5 and came home.

Well, so that's how I spent my day today. It's Krishna's turn to cook tonight, and we might be in for his special Chole...... yummmmmmm.... :)

~Ta tas.