Survived!

I survived the Upper Yoghiogheny river.
:)

Springfield

Ever wonder which Springfield is closest to the fictional Springfield from the show "The Simpsons?"

You can actually look at nomination videos and vote here.


UPDATE:
The nomination videos are not as funny as I expected them to be.
Anyway, I think the show was inspired by either Michigan or Illinois.

Daylight

For all of you in Ann Arbor, in the next couple of days if look at the sky at exactly 10:00 pm, you will still see a hint of daylight.

Alas, the days start to get shorter now :(

Monsters

Time flies, doesn't it?

It's been more than 12 years since I passed out of secondary school, and It's been 10 years since I first started attending Engineering classes.

Those were the days.
Engineering exams, late-night group studies, table tennis in the gym, energy (coffee flavor) at the cafeteria, secret romances, the list is endless.

Procrastinating

I sense a couple of long posts coming.
But I'm trying to avoid those as it's against the philosophy of this blog and that is what led to the demise of my old blog. Moreover, I don't think I have time for long posts. Anyway, let's see.

Twin Bores

Pirates of the Caribbean, one of the worst movies I have ever seen, and a performance by "Strange Fruit," very innovative concept but very boring routine.

Leaning Tower

To all men out there ...

I've found this adage to be pretty useful (and true):

"If at first you don't succeed, then try it your wife's way"

:)

See anybody you know?

Message from aliens?

Can anybody read this?

Summer Festival

Confessions of a Sick Mind

Anybody heard the saying "A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind?"

I am considering making a movie of my desk from still photographs taken daily for a month or so. It would be interesting to see it's dynamics and whether the Spirited Gator's Law of Kitchen Sink holds.

For now, here is a pic of my desk with some comments.


click on the pic for a larger version

• Obviously, I have two computers, a high-end Mac and an old but pretty fast PC
  
• My desk if often cleaner (the piles of papers on the left), but at times it's much worse too :))
  
• Wedding photo in the back (right)
  
• Need a mousepad for the Mac
  
• An old pair of Phillips headphones (left) serve me well. Music is an integral part of work. :)
  
• The wife's photo (left) is burried behind a pile of papers. Time to clean up.
  
• The coffee (top-left) does not belong to me, it's my officemate's. BTW, his desk is the dirtiest desk around.
  
• The queer-looking brown cylinder on the left contains a large quantity of pennies that I'm trying to get rid of (Waiting for the departmental penny wars)
  
• Don't ask me how many of the books on the shelf have I read
  
• The wallpaper on the PC was a pic taken on an Indiana highway (en route to Chicago, from Indianapolis)
  
• I'm a big pencil guy, and the blue pencil on the left (it sort of looks like a pen) is my favorite, cannot work without it
  
• There's more stuff on shelves above and the drawers in the desk not visible in this photo
  
  

Any questions?

Walk through the Arb

Superman

Ever wonder why Superman wears his underwear outside? The answer is simpler than you might think. Seen a guy wearing plain tights? It looks ghastly. A little under(over)wear goes a long way in not looking like a ballet dancer.

Spiderman, however, has come up with a more natural solution; wearing patterned costumes, operating mostly in the dark, and rarely standing up straight (mostly crouching, climbing, swinging). Come to think of it, have you ever seen a poster (or wallpaper) of spiderman standing tall in broad daylight with a chest held high with pride such as this one (a natural superhero pose). Let me know if you find one.

Checking video embedding

Don't forget to watch till the end. :)




You might have to see this a couple of times to understand the "seriousness" of the situation.

Changes

As you can see, I'm experimenting with the layout and looks. The pic in the header, which I clicked almost 2 years ago, looks to be ideal for a header, but the colors don't match the rest of the color scheme on the blog. Also, I thought the idea of the video bar was pretty cool, but it is sort of lame, since there is very little control over what videos are shown in the bar. All I can do is enter search phrases, and t automatically pulls up videos matching the search phrases from youtube and google video.

Let me know if you liked the video bar.

Ultrapod

First snaps with the new ultrapod

90 deg in the shade

Ladies and gentlemen, we have the first 90 deg F (32 deg C) day of the summer. It's awfully warm for early June.

But these are some of the best days to be in AA.

Starting this friday is the Ann Arbor Summer Festival

Do Not Run !!

Some old pics:



Notice that the sign specifically says do not run :)
Jammy, you ought to pay attention to signs.

BTW, the water was a lovely deep blue.



Another view of the 450 foot drop.

Parents Beware

Stone-age fishermen

What we found out yesterday: mints (mentos/polo) are very poor baits for fishing. Not because fishes don't like mint, on the contrary they seem to like mint, but because mints are too big for the fishes' mouths. All they can do is nibble.

The story:

Kela, Yusuf, the wife, and myself were walking around the willowtree lake yesterday, and encouraged by the large numbers of fishes, we decided to try our hand at catching some. Armed with a piece of dead branch, some thin rope-like plant stems, and some mints (the only edible item we had on us at that time), we put our fishing talents to the test. The plan was to pull out the fishing line as soon as any of the fishes took a bite at the mint. Flock to the mint they did, but alas, none could bite and hold on to the mint.

Frustrated by our failures, kela and I resorted to throwing mint pieces into the water to attract the fishes and then spearing down on them with the dead branch. I swear I almost hit one fish. Maybe there is an injured fis limping somewhere in the lake right now.

I'm sure if our lived depended on it, we could have figured out a way to catch some fishes, even with the extremely limited resources tht we had on hand.

Apple (cont.)

Turned out to be a disappointment. Nothing new was unveiled.
Oh well ...

Apple

There's a lot of speculation about what Apple (Steve Jobs) will unveil today at the WWDC. Possibly new iPhone and Leopard features with maybe some new devices. More on this later.

Wanted: Summer pics

It's time I ventred out with the camera and captured some fresh images of the full-fledged summer. Maybe in a couple of days.

Ultimate Frisbee

After a long long time, I played ultimate frisbee yesterday. I was half expecting my stamina to be dramatically improved (thanks to my half marathon training). But I was jolted back to reality when I was gasping for air within the first five minutes of the game. It turns out that stamina with slow steady running doesn't help you much when it comes to alternating fas sprints and stops. Hopefully, I'll get a lot better at it before the end of the summer.

For those who haven't played ultimate frisbee, it's a very enjoyable sport. Definitely worth a try.

Shrek 3

Funny jokes, but boring for the most part. I wasn't particularly impressed.

Wikimapia

An interesting website:

http://www.wikimapia.org/

The site is based on google maps, and lets users add places of interest and some explanations.

Zoom into any place you like and you can look at user-tagged places and explanations. You can also add your own places (see top left) and once a few people vote that your place is genuine and useful, it is made permanent.

I spent a good couple of hours exploring areas around my primary and secondary schools, some of the places we used to hang out (Linking road, 4 bunglows, Bhavan's campus). I also found some comments from people I know (Many of my neighbors had marked our society as their territory :) ).

p.s. The site is on the slower side, it takes a few seconds to load all the places, every time you zoom or pan.

Courage

Remembered a quote:

Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is that little voice at the end of the day that says: "I'll try again tomorrow."

Road to recovery

Still recovering from the Half marathon from yesterday. I promise to post pics of the run soon.

Meanwhile, here are some pics(taken by action sports images) from my traverse city run.
(I didn't realize you were supposed to smile at the finish line :)), but you can tell that Yusuf knew )

http://www.backprint.com/go.asp?20511374

Race weekend

Finally, race weekend is here. I'm excited about the race, but I'm equally excited about getting done with the run and finally being able to do other stuff on weekdays. :))

It's also unusually warm here the last 3-4 days. But it's supposed to rain tomorrow.
It's going to be fun. We also have the AA food festival with half off for runners tomorrow!

The Story of Higgins Lake

On the way back from Traverse City, since we had some extra time, we decided to stop at some random state park. Luckily, we decided to stop at this Higgins lake which looked quite ordinary on the map.

But when we reached there, we were confronted with this beautiful lake with the clearest water I had ever seen. Well you can't really make that out in the photo below (and it's not a particularly flattering pic of any of the three of us), but what you will notice is that the is a region closer to the photographer is light green/blue in color and it transitions abruptly to a deep blue color.



We swam almost to the edge of the transition and used our swimming goggles to check out what the color change was all about. And the sight was a real scary one. We could clearly see the lake bed for about 8-10 feet in front of us and then it seemed as if there was nothing at all beyond that. After some deliberation, I decided to swim right to that edge, and when I just about reached the edge, I saw the lake floor slant down at more than a 45 degree angle and disappear into the depths of the clear blue water. Of course, I immediately turned back and swam as fast as I could to safety.

Although I think I won't be scared to swim in the middle of the lake, seeing the lake floor disappear into the distance was very scary. It was almost like vertigo.
A similar comparison:
You won't be scared to view Chicago from the top of the 100+ storied Sears towers (from a safe glass covered indoor viewing area), but one would be much more scared to stand at the edge of a windy 10th floor balcony with no guard rails.

The image of the disappearing lake floor still haunts me. :)

p.s. Lake Higgins is voted the 6th most beautiful lake in the world by National Geographic.

Runs 05/26 - 05/31

05/26 - 6.25 miles (10Km), 51:08 in Traverse City.
A blazing 8:15 minute a mile pace. The course was very pretty, lake michigan on one side and cherry trees and cute houses on the other side. Running together with Yusuf was a big help, and not to mention the adrenaline boost from running with so many people.

05/29 - 4 miles, 39:00.
Was super hot and humid. Starting running at almost an 8 minute mile pace but had to give up after 2 miles due to the heat. Finished the rest of the run with alternating runs and brief walks.

05/30 - 5 miles, 54:00.
Very relaxed run with Wifey. Didn't want to strain myself this week, esp after the fiasco the previous day.

05/31 - 2 miles, 14:45.
Decided to push myself as it was a short run. Imagined myself running the last 2 miles of a half marathon and willed myself to maintain a blistering pace (7:23 per mile). I'm sure we ran faster than this in the last 2 miles of the Traverse City 10K run, but I don't know how we managed it.

BTW, did I mention that after a run, no matter what the distance and time, you feel highly elated. This is referred to as the runners high, and is particularly true if you finish strong.

Also, most of the information on these runs are for archival purposes. Don't feel obligated to read these posts. :))

Half Marathon

The Half marathon that we will run this weekend is 13.1 miles (21.08 Km). Just to put this in perspective, the distance from Mulund Station to Dadar Cenral Station is exactl 21.5 Km (almost exactly a half marathon).

Here's the proof

The distance from Mulund station to VT (CST) is roughly 30 something Km, which is much less than the 42 Km (Full Marathon) that kela ran at Travere City last week.

Suprisingly, all the roads (even the smaller ones) in Mumbai are labelled pretty accurately in Google maps. The only exception being that Mulund station is mislabelled as Thane.

My goal is to finish the half marathon in under 2 hours (less than 6 minutes per Km, or roughly 9 minutes a mile).

BBQ

Dasha Avataar

Jammy's dad made a very interesting observation today:

The Dasha Avataar closely resembles the natural evolutionary sequence.

1. Matsya - The Fish
2. Kurma- The Tortoise
3. Varaha- The Boar
4. Narasimha- The Man-Lion
5. Vamana - The Dwarf
6. Parasurama - The Warrior
7. Sri Rama - The King
8. Sri Krishna - The Cowherd
9. Buddha - The Teacher
10. Kalki - The Slayer

There are two arguments that can be made based on this observation.
1. Maybe we can learn something about our future evolutionary form by looking at the avtaar that is yet to occur (The Slayer!! Seems like a bleak future for Humankind, and probably obvious).
2. In those days when Science was not an established discipline, the only way to pass on scientific information is by making up stories and incorporating it into the religious texts.

So maybe our forefathers were onto something.

Travel Tales

There are a few interesting stories from our trip, which I'll post in the coming days.

At the shores of Lake Michigan

Traverse City

Off to Traverse city and sleeping bear dunes for the memorial day weekend. Will be gone from Friday through Monday. 4 days of fun on the beach (well, mostly).

See you all later.

Run 05/24

5 miles, roughly 47 minutes.

Ran in Gallup park. It was a very warm day, but it was fun.
Forgot to wear a watch, so don't have an accurate time.

Nice pic

Came across this pic on flickr. It's an old idea, but well executed.

Run 05/23

2 miles, 17:26.

Probably my fastest pace yet (under 9 minute a mile). But I'm afraid the distance is too short to mean anything.

Aero Cookout

Am looking forward to the first Aero Cookout of the summer, which is later today. There is something about the smell of barbeque, and having hot dogs and burgers with chips brownies, cookies, and salad on a warm and bright summer day.

Weather forceast for today:
Bright and sunny, 83 deg F.

A hard choice

I don't know why I was thinking about this today, but here goes...

Let's say the fastest you have run one mile in is 4:30, but on an average day you run one mile in 5:00 (which also means that you sometimes run a mile in more than 5 minutes). And also assume that once you run a mile at that speed, you would be absolutely drained and would have a tough time doing anything else.

Now, let's say you are stuck in a deserted place and there is a train station exactly one mile from where you are. Also, you know that a train leaves from the station exactly in 4 minutes 50 seconds. If you manage to get on the train it'll take you 30 miles to the nearest civilized place, whereas, if you miss the train, you'll have to walk for at least 30 miles.

So would you try to run the mile in under 4:50 and catch the train knowing very well that if you miss the train you'll have no energy left to walk the remaining 30 miles? Or would you conserve your energy and not try to run a 4:50 mile but resign yoursefl to walking 30+1 miles?

Life is full of hard choices like this one, don't you think?

Weird

An electric pole nearby is supported by some wires and rods which actually go through some trees. It's hard to tell whether the tress grew around these wires or wether the wires were drilled through the trees.

Welcome

our doorstep

Run 05/20

12 miles, 2:16:00.

We ran in the morning in Gallup, which was a lot of fun. Knees were terribly sore after the run.

Chawal, Subji, and Chai

One often sees images from China and India, where some common English word is misspelled. Now here is a counter example where the Hindi words Chawal, Subji, and Chai are grossly misspelled here in an American book.




Raaice




Vegerables





Dee

We could hardly control ourselves yesterday at the library. :)

Missing Power Cord

I seem to have left my laptop power cord in the library.

I had a few posts lined up. Now, they'll have to wait till tomorrow.

Run 05/17

4.5 miles, 49 minutes.

Tried a new route to the west side of main street. The route was very nice but had a lot of alternating uphill and downhill regions (a little hard on the knees). But enjoyed the run at a relaxed pace and in fairly cold weather (44 deg F / 7 deg C).

FYI

We live in the historic district.

Run 05/16

3 miles, 31 minutes

Today's was a relatively relaxed run in slightly coolish weather. Was fun.

New pics

Have a couple of pics from farmers market that I'll post soon. Keep an eye out for an updated photograph on the left.

My 3rd post in the last 30 minutes, that ought to be a record of some kind. :)

Mildly annoyed

Hmmm... I don't really like this, some of my posts are getting longer and longer.

Also, I forgot to mention that yesterday's run was probably my worst ever. I was supposed to run 11 miles, but gave up after 7. Taking a break in training of 2 weeks (due to my defense) was probably the worst thing to do.

Evolution

Today at lunch with my advisor, we started talking about the number of languages in India, and how some of the languages are becoming extinct. My advisor mentioned that he'd read in some article that many languages were dying because young kids influenced by hollywood movies and pop songs preferred to speak and learn English rather than their native tongue.

At that time, we agreed that this was a sad state of affairs since many rich and historic languages may be going into oblivion. But later when my mind drifted back to the same topic, I realized that eventually the entire world would have to speak a common language (assuming we are all going to be a united human race in the future). And naturally, according to the law of evolution, the fittest language would survive while many of the weaker languages would become extinct.

So shouldn't we really be happy that many languages are disappearing and we are moving towards a common language?

p.s. Wifey and myself had a very pleasant lunch with my advisor, another professor and a couple of other students who graduated recently. At the lunch, we were also presented with 'awards of recognition.'

It's summer time

I finally got some serious work done today. I hadn't done that much the last three days. Getting back to full speed is harder than I thought.

Meanwhile, it is warming up nicely here. On top of that, there's light till 9:00PM.

Leave office promptly at 5:00 (and often before 5:00 :) ), have a cup of coffee at home while watching TV, then go for an evening stroll or run and maybe hang out at central. I'm loving these summer days. (Well, it's not officially summer yet and it won't be until July, but it already feels like summer.)

Lazy sunday afternoon

If you want a relaxing sunday, try lazing around on the diag, throwing some frisbee, and then uploading some new pics on orkut.

Felt nice to do that.

Run 05/12

5 miles, 45:51

Clear weather, gentle wind with short periods of moderate wind, finished strong with the last mile in 7:50. Was dead tired after it was done.

My next run is a 11 mile run on Monday.

Farmer's market time

Yaaay!! it's Saturday, so it's farmer's market time. I might have some nice pics soon.

Roots

An inevtiable question that every Indian in the US faces at some point or the other is
"Do you want to go back to India? If so, when?"

It's a question with no easy answer. Somehow, there is an implicit assumption that if you've come to the US to study, then you have come here with the intention of settling here and making big bucks here. On the contrary, I think almost every Indian here wants to go back to India eventually (deep down in their hearts, they want to). But often, due to inertia, they just end up staying back in the US.
(An aspect that was dealt with very nicely in the movie "The Namesake")

When is a good time to return? Something to chew over.

Connected!

Today we got a new cable connection, and tomorrow we'll get an internet connection. Yay!
It feels so helpless to be without a net connection.

And now I can post more fequently too, yay again!

Rainy day

Today was a unusually rainy day. It has been raining almost continuously since morning, with periods of heavy downpour (which is sort of rare in these parts of the world).

The fresh green springs leaves looked even fresher and greener. It was almost like mahabaleshwar in the monsoon season.


Luckily it let up after 7:00 pm, just in time for our evening run.

Run 05/09

5 miles, 46:00

mostly cloudy, very humid (it had been a rainy day), gentle wind towards the end.

I was drained at the end, probably because I started too fast. Must pace myself better next time.

BTW, this has to be my favorite route. Once around the diag is exactly one mile. Awesome location. No signals. Perfectly flat (no uphills or downhills). Wide and clean pavements.

Run 05/07/07

To have a permanent record of past runs, I'll be posting some run details on this blog.

05/07/07 - Ran 9.2 miles in 1:59:10.
Clear weather, little wind, almost no run practice in the past couple of weeks.

new links

I'll try to keep posting updated information on our latest runs and most recent photographs under the section "Latest updates." However, I don't plan on putting up any personal pics on my flickr photo stream.

p.s. For those who haven't used google maps, you need to know how to zoom in and out and pan, to fully appreciate the "run" links.

Hare Pic

BTW, I dedicate this pic to Pammu don
"Har Hara Hare Hairy Hai"

:)

Mysterious Wildlife

In the last one week we've spotted hares near our new place on three different occasions, which is suprising because we now live closer to downtown and not near a forest or park.

At our old place, we'd see lots of deer, a few raccoons and skunks, and an occaisonal hare or a fox. But the spottings would be in the range of once or twice a month.

And what's really puzzling is that all the wildlife here seem to be nocturnal (even the deer and the hares).

Anyway, I hope to have some pictures soon.

Travel the world

I've become a big fan of Flickr nowadays. I don't know why It took me so long though. Checkout the flickr link in my daily trail (see left side of this page).

You'll often find photographs that take you to a different time and a different place.

A new week

Didn't think I would say this, but I'm eager to get started with the next week. Have a lot of stuff to get done.

Motivation

Motivation is a funny thing, sometimes when you are looking forward to be highly motivated to complete a project, you have a motivation slump. Other times, when you least expect it, you get a burst of motivation.

Completing a PhD definitely teaches you self motivational skills, which I'm trying to apply to keep myself motivated over the summer.

BTW, vegetable maggi and mashed potatoes isn't such a bad combination after all.

BollyWeb

Spiderman 3 was a little bit of a disappointment. I wasn't expecting spiderman to break into a song and dance and cry 2-3 times in the movie. A very shahrukh-style movie.

Overture

As I return to blogging, I keep wondering why I gave up on blogging a couple of years ago.

Maybe I felt compelled to write long intelligent articles. I soon found that I neither had the time nor the motivation for the same.

So this time around, I think I'll try posting one liners and short messages, maybe even multiple times a day.

Welcome!