Category: General

Site broken

My second sem begins at the U of M. Taking the initial weeks of low(er) work to recode the guts of the site. It’s currently in beta and complete operation is not guaranteed.

Another term begins

First day of my second semester here at the U of M. It wasn’t as exciting as my first day, which is obvious I suppose. Had two classes today, and I’m definitely dropping the second one. This leaves me with just the three courses and I still need one more. Don’t really know how it’s going to fall into place. And the course I am dropping, done most of the stuff before, not exactly great a teacher, and it involves lots of homework and tests AND a term paper or some such. This is an extremely good way to waste a lot of time and I’m not planning on doing that.

Didn’t get the chance to meet my advisor today and this further leads me in this suspended state where I don’t know clearly what I can do and where I am heading.

The other class was “entertaining” though. It’s like vibes, though I hope I learn more than I did in that class, not to mention do better ;).

Decisions Decisions

Another slow day. Spent most of the day messing around with the college of engineering course bulletin, wolverine access and pestering people in an attempt to figure out my courses for next term. Currently, I’ve sort of finalized ME – 512 – Theory of Elasticity, ME – 505 – FEM in Mechanics, and ME – 590 – An independent study/research under Prof. Garikipati. The problem being, anything else I want to take clashes with these because.. I don’t think they planned enough when they decided which courses to offer in which semesters. This hmm.. is a bit of an irritant. Another scary thing is one of the classes I’ve enrolled for and want to take has 24 vacant seats out of 30. Now that’s scary because people seem to tell me that the class will be “cancelled” if such a small number of people want to take it. I just have to hope for my sake that they’re wrong and I have nothing to worry about.

Subjects I would love to do are either not offered this semester, offered and clash, or I don’t meet the pre reqs which aren’t offered in this term. Irritation.. in a helpless sort of way, NOT the way I’d like to start a semester. I’ve got to figure this out by tonight, after I work out some problems with a group preparing for their qualifiers. :), yes, coming here automatically puts you into the “work mode” seeing everybody around you.

Another lunch at Subway makes me wonder what I’ve been doing all my life not experimenting with a large variety of salad dressings during the course of my existence. Either it’s just extremely good or the initial charm, I feel like I can live of salads and sandwiches all my life.

Majorly reworking the guts of my personal website today. The template, v5, seems to be coming out nicely and it abstracts most of the page into manageable chunks and generally cuts the size of the individual pages to half their original sizes or something. Also realized that the CSS file I am using doesn’t validate in the W3C CSS validator and this needs some work before it can be fixed.

Back to reality

Back in college. Writing this from the (not so) famous grad. lounge (a room, but it’s got an Ethernet port and that’s all that matters). Return signifies work and should cause me to hmm.. react in a very different way from what I am doing. I don’t feel even the least bit down or hatching those evil genius (well.. not so evil, not so geniusy) plans on how to avoid it. Ran into one of my teachers here, quite surprising, considering it’s a Saturday. Anyway, all of this points to work, and I can’t wait to get back. Everybody is slowly getting back to “reality”. Ashwin left today morning for Florida.

My drive back was pretty. All WHITE except the cleared roads. I should have stopped staring at it since it should be “normal” by now considering how cold it is and how “common” it is, but, that’s logic, I’ve still not got out of the habit of just staring outside.. and going wow. Then the cruel realities like having to walk through it to get to classes and such makes me hmm.. not like it so much anymore. Net effect, no feelings positive or negative towards the weather. Which is a good thing.

These holidays have given time for me to “connect” with a bunch of cartoon/comic/toy characters called the Transformers. I’ve been reading the original comics, catching some clips of the episodes, and even watched the movie. Cool, in a nostalgia inducing kind of way. Here I am, 10 years older, and still find them just as cool. Well, saying anymore will further the “lack of intellectual development” truths which I’ve tried so hard to hide ;). The sad part of this story begins when I noticed their old toys selling in Ebay for a lot. Which is sad since I don’t have a time machine to tell the younger me NOT to destroy my collection. I did have fun then, but that could have made tuition now. What’s more important, I can’t tell. (I can, but I’d be too guilty spelling it out.)

The holidays also made me realize that if I had to give up Indian food, I could. We went to this Indian restaurant recently (name hidden, obviously will be devastating to their business since this is such an often hit site) and that obviously resulted in me having such revelations regarding my gastronomical preferences. Needless to say the food was quite bad.

New years resolutions !

Finally convinced myself to attempt to maintain one of these again. It’s a new year, and I figured why not make some changes? Well, let’s just see how long I can keep this up once school starts. Yes it’s a day or two late for a new years resolution but hey, better late than never.

I’ve read somewhere that if you don’t do one thing worth writing about everyday, you aren’t living. I shall attempt to prove that author wrong by living, and not doing anything worth writing about, and writing about it.. every day. Or every day that my (soon to be) busy schedule allows anyway. Having my own computer should definitely help in this regard.

The holidays have been great fun and I’ve caught up on so many movies I hadn’t had the chance to see. The latest being Monsoon Wedding (English movie, yeah right), Lord of the Rings – II ,Minority Report and Gosford Park. The last two being very good. Also, experiencing American theater when it’s subzero (in units used everywhere but here :P?) outside was quite an experience. This period has also resulted in me gaining a few pounds but who’s counting? Lack of care towards hair on my head and no attempts at removing facial hair over a long period tend to add to my “stare and say what you like, I don’t really care” look. Also proceeding (now slowly, yet) steadily towards that ponytail.

They haven’t, unfortunately, been tremendously productive. I shall attempt to remedy that situation with the help of the nice people on google groups from such fancy places such as Wolfram Research and re attempt working with free software and nothing else. I’m sure GiNaC, Yacas, Maxima etc should be able to get the job done.. and better.

This also happens to be my last day of my hols outside campus. Tomorrow sometime, I’ll be dropped back to my apartment and I have to get back to reality again. I know it’s going to be a lot of work, but I daresay I am looking forward to it.

Yes, you aren’t hallucinating, you heard me right.

Activity Activity Activity!

This entry into my journal is almost fully shamelessly ripped off from a mail I sent my parents. I suddenly convinced my fingers to type again, so here goes…

Today was one of the most activity filled days of my life. Come to think of it, it was THE most activity filled day of my life. I woke early (at some 4:40 am) and made myself some tea. Talked to my mom in the morning and then got ready to leave after breakfast and a HOT shower. The sun rises pretty early as well, considering it set after 9 p.m or so. I don’t seem to have too much of a jet lag, though time might prove me wrong.

We (my uncle and I) left in the morning around 8:45. Around this time my aunt left with my cousin for his camp. Our first stop was a US state dept office to get me a social security number. It was a small wait outside that office as it opened only around 9. Got in, filled some forms and submitted them without any problems. It should be arriving in a week to ten days via mail. People here are very friendly and seem very happy to serve. They don’t get irritated even if we keep bugging them with the stupidest of questions. With that done, we went to the AA to pick up some (quite a few actually, pity I don’t have the slightest idea how to read them) maps. Armed with the new found knowledge of where to go, we headed to Ann Arbor, after a quick stop at a bank. Again, just as the service people are very friendly, there are barely any service people. Almost everything is automated. And when I said bank, I meant drive-in ATM. Ann Arbor was about half an hour away from here. The roads are wide and traffic is fast. But it is still quite crowded. It’s not like the place is like those videos of Europe or something we see on TV. Anyway, we reached a point in the campus, called the hmm.. I forgot. The something of commons. Here’s where I met my classmate Sandeep, the person who travelled with me on the plane. He is being put up in one of the seniors homes. I met him at this office where we get a photo Umich ID. They took a snap right there and printed my brand new UMID. That’s like the all in all ID for all services at campus. It gives access to labs, libraries, and other facilities. The campus is just beautiful. It’s scenic, quiet, and feels like a nice town filled with (I hope) intelligent people. There is a very large variation in the kind of people you see here. But they all smile and they all seem very busy. No one seems to just relax and laze around. Sad, but true.

Once I was done with the ID, we left that part of campus (which is fairly close to my department) and we tried to look around and find my apartment. It took us a while, but we did eventually. It seems pretty nice from the outside. The neighbourhood is quiet. It is about a 20min brisk walk from my department. Which is good I suppose considering the rich rich food over here. One of the reasons we were looking for it, besides obvious curiosity as to how it was, was that I needed an address for the bank account I needed to open. There was one bank very close to the office where my ID was issued, but the trouble was that was a UMich only bank, and I can’t access it from outside. So my uncle decided it was better I got an account at a larger bank, which has counters at various points on campus, and one close to their home as well. We tried to find the office of the people who are dealing with the leasing of the apartments, so that I could find my actual aparment number, to use as my permanent address. They were very hard to find. We were driving for about 40 minutes looking for them when they were not very far away. The funny part is, in most of that time, he was on the phone with them, calling them like some 10 times and asking for directions. Not ONCE did they get even a bit irritated or their tone change. We finally found their place and found out what we needed. I even signed my house lease and payed up 1/4 of the money for initial things. This was done by my uncle. Made mental note of the amount. Then as usual, we smiled, exchanged the usual “have a great day” style talk and left. All that had taken a while. Armed with my new address, we headed back to central campus. It’s like the “downtown” of campus. There are many shops, restaurants, banks.. those sort of things. Mostly geared towards students. I had my lunch there. It was a tomato and lentil soup, a cheese pita (something like a chappathi or bread with cheese and vegitable filling), and some corn chips. It was very nice. This was at this place called ‘Seva’, a specialty vegetarian restaurant. I was surprised to see it full, considering the local diet, but it was. The parking, by the way, at this part of town for such things was at the 6th floor, yes 6th, of the parking lot. After lunch we went to the bank and opened an account. Again my uncle payed the initial balance. Mental note made of that as well. As usual, the lady there was all smiles and everything. Opening a bank account was made fun too. As a compliment, I got a Michigan sweat shirt. It’s.. gray.

After the bank came the visit to the international students office. This is now at the heart of the campus. It has much more activity but still retains a very ‘universityish’ feeling. Lots of grass and young people. All kinds.. on foot, cycles, roller blades, cars.. everything. Here, in this office, they help you again with social service, how to get the UMich ID, drivers lisence etc.. All stuff we had handled. They gave me a small orientation like thing and gave a HUGE folder with all sorts of pamphlets and info. The person there made me go through a check-list of things that needed to be done. We had done most of it. Next stop.. two or three rooms down the same hall, I got my medical insurance. It’s some 40$ a month, with a maximum claim of some $250,000. Hmm…. (I now remember my requirement for all my years is $200,000.. hmm) ;)

With that done also, we moved on to a computer lab to get my college email and other lab access related stuff done. That took another few minutes. We then drove back to the (much quieter and less americany) north campus, to my department. Here I met the graduate adviser, Ms. Elgas. She recognised my name from the emails and seemed, (as everybody else) happy to see me there. I had to spend a long time there sorting out stuff related to what I needed to do (coursewise) and got a sir who most matched my interests. I suppose next stage is to meet him and actually sort out my courses and other details. In the meantime, the parking for the area was only for students and my uncle had left to get a pass. He joined me later in her office. The dept. itself seems nice and all professional. The next stage of the plan, which I think people expect me to do tomorrow, is to use all this new found knowledge and the TONS of pamphlets and other paperwork I got from there to my advantage, when I get dropped off there tomorrow (alone) and talk to sirs/anybody else useful regarding assitantship. Now I don’t know whether I’ll do that tomorrow itself.. but that’s one of the plans anyhow.

With all this done for the day, we then went back to the aparment area to just get a glimpse of my particular one from the outside. Nothing much to say, it looked like everything else. It seems decent.. and has this cool gray colour. Then came the quick scouting of what shops/services are there where and how long it would take to go to each major place. We then started the journey back home.

That’s about it for today,
Too tired/sleepy/dazed to even think.