Horribly over-powered cleaning fluid

Saw this dialogue on a sitcom yesterday. Have to add it to my “safe”, it sounds like it’ll come in handy someday.

“Saw this and thought of you. See everything and think of you”

Messed up my favorite navy blue sweater last evening attempting a cleaning project. I know the cleaning spray bottle did warn that clothes should be kept out of contact with the fluid but it was an accident. I must have leaned on one of the surfaces I had just wiped. Thirty seconds later, the blue is ORANGE, from wrist to elbow on one hand. There I did it, single handedly managed to ruin a piece of winter clothing.

Met the other two teachers and they started on the paperwork. I’m almost through :).

Also, to celebrate again, spent $25 on posters. Homer J. Simpson, the Power Puff Girls, and the Transformers. Nice.

The news trickles out

Told my roomies the news last night. I had to, it came up in a conversation. Not yet told Amma and Appa though, won’t until I see it “physically” in wolverine access. In another weird money making scheme, you’d expect the fine on a $96 insurance payment to be small if the fine on $13,000 and odd is just $30. But NO, it’s $30 even for $96. How weird is that?

Well, in the state I am in right now, I’d be happy to part with the $30 if it means that’s all I have to part with.

Seen two cool posters in the poster sale and just hope they don’t get sold before I have the time to go buy them. One awesome Transformers – The Movie poster and another ultra cool one of the Power Puff Girls, the coolest cartoon characters, ever?

Mathematica isn’t as cool as I’d hoped it would be. Yes it works, but not when it really has to. Those GiNaC developers better get cracking and make Mathematica redundant. I can’t take another night of letting it run only to find out next day it “Ran out of memory”. 512MB system memory and 30GB swap? Come on, I could work it out on pencil and paper with less. Ok, exaggerating but it’s just bugging me.

Sat in on many classes today. Life is going to get real hard, real fast. Had to drop an advanced solid state physics class where extreme quantum mechanics, d dimensional spheres and such are “normal” before it totally destroyed my self confidence.

Ray of light

Already missed one day on these journal updates. Yes, I’m a busy man. Getting all excited thinking about the prospects of financial assistantship and hope this isn’t a false alarm like last time. I really do. Anyway, feeling all good with myself and treated myself to a scrumptuous lunch, yes a large sandwich. Was cool. Being the negative guy I usually am, I would be telling myself something like “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch” or some such. But enoughs enough and I deserve a break.

Just chilling, listening to music and things.

Don’t know whether to break the news to parents just yet. I don’t want them to go through this roller coaster style bunch of emotions like I am. Amma’s started violin lessons. Good, and hope she has a great time.

On a side note, our house is becoming more of a home, atleast physically. Though I am more than happy with my one piece of furniture, my bed.. (which functions as my work space, my book shelf, my computer docking station, my couch, and of course.. where I sleep) my roomies are a bit more “wasteful”. They actually need a table and chair, a bed, a bookshelf, a DINING table.. (sheesh) and such. Well, with all the new acquisitions, home seems a bit more cramped.. in a nice sort of way.

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.