Its 11 o clock in the morning and am still at home on a weekday morning. Its all because of the UPS. I had ordered a few things online and its been shipped by UPS ground. The UPS has made two attempts to deliver it to me. But i wasn't here. Obviously, u cant expect a person to be at home waiting for the parcel, right !!! I am a student, so its a bit easy for me. But what about a working person? There must be some other way...Now, sitting at home, i thought there must be some way so that a person can get his parcel without being at home. I just flipped the UPS notice and lo behold , i saw a column to authorise the driver to drop the box in front of our home or whereever we specify. It was so dumb of me to have not noticed this earlier. I postponed few of the works i had to do this morning. Anyway, i will stay at home to get this parcel myself. From next time, i will make use of the options. So dumb of me !!!

Phew !!! its been a long day. Working for Diwali Nite has taken up my whole weekend. I was working on the backdrop from yesterday night until 4 in the morning. Then had to get up at 9 o clock and go to MU kitchen for cooking work. I woke a little late and eventually reached MU at 10. Worked until 3 in the afternoon. Then went on to help the decorations people in the Great Hall. When the clock struck 6, i thought this was the time to sit back and enjoy the cultural programmes. And there came the next work. Had to videotape all the cultural programmes!!! oh...my legs are aching now. I should get some sleep now. Am dozing off already while typing this. I better go and sleep...zzzzzzzz.....

At last, the presentation got over today. Didnt get proper sleep for the past two days because of this presentation. Had to compare two papers with differing simulation techniques but for the same problem. Till yesterday morning, i was prepared with two papers which had the same technique but the system evolution was different. So, had to read a different paper and prepare the report and presentation within a night. Why do i always keep things till the last moment ? Hmmm....anyway, its over now. Parkinsons law holds good for any work - "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion".

Its been more than 20 days since i did any experiments. The last experiment i did was on oct 4th just before the JVST paper deadline. After the deadline was met, i concentrated on my simulation course and project. So, havent done any experiments. Moreover, to perform the experiments, i need an EFM tip holder (specialised to perform electrical connections) and my advisor is not willing to spend on buying an EFM tip holder. It costs around 2300 bucks !!! The conference is on Nov 4th in Baltimore. I needed to do a small experiment today to complete the presentation. So, i had been to the Molecular Biology Building (i call it the haunted lab!!!) tonight to get some data.

My roommate is an ISA committee member and he has been given the responsibility of printing the invites for Diwali Nite, which is scheduled for this weekend. He had asked me to take some color printouts of the invite for him. When i took the printout, i read thru the invite and found several spelling mistakes. I immediately told my friend about it. But he said he couldnt do anything about it and we had to deal with it. So much for politics inside the committee. He said that he was not the one responsible for the invites' design. He is just taking the printouts and he never cared to read thru the invite. Though he is not at fault, i gave him a piece of my mind. The outcome is that the invites are going to stay the same...no changes...phew !!!

I listened to Harivaraasanam song atleast a dozen times today. Beautifully rendered by my favorite playback singer Yesudas (or Jesudas, still not sure which is right !!!). I fell for this song, the first time i heard it some 7 years back. I accidentally came across this song over the web and listened to it yesterday. Since then, i have been humming the same song every minute.  

Every sunday afternoon, my roommates and myself eat outside. Every week, we have the same contemplation as to which restaurant we have to go. We put off the decision until we reach Welch Avenue and once we reach there, we argue about the goods and bads of various restaurants on that road, and finally end up in Thai Kitchen everytime. Today, also we ended up at Thai Kitchen and I had the same old R3 Fried vegetable rice (Yellow curry w/ fried tofu, egg ok, spicy - this is how the lady in the restaurant notes down my order). Next weekend, I am determined to venture a new restaurant. Let me see !!!

Today, I attended a lecture by Dr. M.S.Swaminathan who is the founder of Green Revoution in India. The lecture was held in the Memorial Union of my University (Iowa State University) as a part of the Norman Borlaug lecture series. He is considered as one of the three most influential Indians of twentieth century. He was awarded the World Food Prize in 1987. His today's lecture topic was "A Hunger-Free World: The Final Milestone". His lecture was so inspirational and wonderful. He was so proud to be an Indian. He addressed India as "my county" throughout the lecture. He said in front of a whole American crowd that " You Americans are 10 million tonnes behind us in (some crop, i forgot) production. We are ahead of you in that." Ofcourse, he did not mean to offend anybody. Just that he was so proud of the many facts about India. He quoted an instance which i liked and was awestruck on hearing that. In a coastal hamlet called Veerampattinam near pondicherry, India, information about the wave heights and other climatic conditions (state-of the art technological information from the web) are braodacasted through loudspeakers and the fishermen hear to that before they leave for fishing. Amazing isn't it? I have heard of the word called 'visionary' but i have always wondered how a visionary would look like and lo behold i saw one today. One thing about his speech was that he was speaking incoherently and also fast at times. Sometimes, when he was elaborating something that was on the slide, he would suddenly speak which came to his mind. When he is speaking about some topic, he would quote something very different from that topic and come back to the same instantly. It takes sometime before we realise what he was talking about and that indeed he had some relation between the topics. I remember my mom telling me once about a book called "Ulysses" and how James Joyce, the author, narrated the novel with a technique called the "stream-of-consciousness". That was one book my mom found very difficult to read and comprehend. I haven't read that book myself but i could imagine how it would have been after hearing to Dr. Swaminathan's speech. Overall, it was a great speech and I pat myself for attending this lecture at 8 pm in the night instead of doing something worthless.

This is my first blog ever. Until two months back, I never knew that there was a whole new blogging world out there. Two months back, I was introduced to this word "Blogging" by my sister. One fine day, when we were chatting, she told me that she was about to blog. I did not understand that word and asked my sister for an explanation. She told me all about blogging and curiosity got the best out of me from then on. Since then, I have been reading several public blogs over the web. Until a few days back, it did not occur to me to start a blog of my own. And here I am, at the end of a long day, trying to create my own blog.