Finally, after switching blog hosters we have a blog up and running again. The down time was quite annoying especially because I had finished with IU & was free like I haven't been in a long time. I spent a couple of weeks in Seattle having my first experience with 2 cats as pets and changing from either running away form them or driving them away to missing them wake me up by scraping my door in the morning & running after me until I serve them stuff with my breakfast. I think I am going to get cats as pets. So much easier than a dog. Considering that I never had a pet before & am generally uncomfortable around creatures rubbing their fur or licking me, this is a huge step!

I flew Air India for the first time this week & since the number of hops were 1-3 less than my usual, I actually got all my bags. The worst leg of my travel was from Delhi to Cochin, the crowd & the pushing & shoving their way through every little gap to get ahead in line at the airport was quite frustrating.

Haven't stepped out of home yet in Cochin but the rain & the smell of wet earth are so reminiscent of childhood. I look forward to this vacation in India.

So, I can swim the breadth of a pool now. Free style & back stroke. I still need to get comfortable with breathing in water and expending lesser energy than I do now. But being able to swim feels good, after 2 months of struggle.

There are so many things to keep in mind while swimming, I just don't have that many buffers. A little like learning to drive. So, hopefully with more time in water I'll internalize some of these things and the book keeping won't be as cumbersome. The length of the pool makes me nervous, just the thought that if I stop I will drown is scary enough. It is one of those initial mental block things I guess.

Swimming has changed a few things like the days I swim I have to eat well before & after swimming. Boy, does swimming make you hungry or what! The intake of water has increased many fold when in the pool. It is not intentional. I spend a substantial amount on parking every class. Sometimes during the session I know my instructor is talking to me only through his body language or coz I see his lips moving, my ears are full of water and I feel stupid trying to make sense of what he said. There should be an easy way to get the water out of your ears spontaneously.

I have been busy with random things.

The good - Spring has begun here, the weather is great (yeah, its shorts & bike time again!!), the car is running fine and I can finally use an arm for swimming.

The bad - I have been keeping unwell and am still unwell.

The good - I have to book tickets to India, I am planning a 2 month vacation in summer in India

The bad - I have to pay for the tickets

Besides school, I did a bit of travelling to discover that "Hot Springs" in Arkansas is a myth. Hot springs, Arkansas does not have any hot springs left, yellowstone national park is still the only place I have seen real hot springs & plenty of them. Mammoth caves in Kentucky on the other hand has some beautiful caves with some fabulous stalactite formations.

I would like to:

   Eat a good meal, sit back, relax, meet some non-CS people, return some of the missed calls, sleep like there is no tomorrow

I will

o   Not cook & when absolutely starved, struggle to find some place open and drive-able and get a take away some thing.

o   Get worked up about the no. of things that need to be completed.

o   Sit before my monitor for hours and get up only to visit the restroom or get some water when the bottle is empty only to realize how my back hurts, my legs hurt, my posture isn’t right, eyes feel heavy as I forgot to blink and come back and continue.

o   Go to sleep when I have made the same obvious mistake over 3 times and feel completely brain dead

o   Wake up to an alarm that I want to toss away in the morning

On the bright side, next week is spring break and I hope to spend at least a few days *not working*. The remaining time, I hope to catch up with things, esp. the compiler.

We had a snow storm last week and my classes got cancelled for 2 days. The weather was bad, there was no question of driving. After a few days, the snow began turning into ice. Here are some pictures taken in the last 2 days. You can click them for better clarity.

And today there was lots of water, thanks to the sunshine after what feels like a looong time. (temp: 6C)

I upgraded to the new dasblog which is the reason that comments could not be added to the new entries. The upgrader tool did not work on the content folder items and so adding a comment to the old entry meant losing all old comments. I manually patched some of the old xml files to include the two new tags in the comment section. (pains of upgrading!) Seems to work for now.

I haven’t been able to post new entries. Finally, Rosh fixed the new entry and comment problem.  Apparently the asp.net anonymous user exceeded its disk quota. Now you know why Roshan and Pandu (and myself) haven’t been blogging.

The first week of the semester has been quite good. I will continue working as a research assistant with Dr. Fox and will continue blogging about the status on blogspot. For the courses this semester, I have taken Compilers and Dynamic Logic in my department. I have also enrolled for swimming lessons with the sports school. I am quite excited about learning something new outside of CS after, who knows, how many years.

The winter here has been very mild so far, which is quite great. Its mid-jan and we have not had a proper snow fall yet. Great! I look forward to an exciting semester, I am also telling myself to make best of the time I have left in Bloomington & at Indiana University. This would mean watch some of the auditions, performances, oprahs etc in the music school here which is one of the best in the country; see all the museums and whatever little there is to see in the city.

Its going to be an eventful year in many senses.

[This entry was written on Friday, I couldn’t post it as dasblog failed to add new entries. So, some things like "no snow" etc are meaningless now]