Some guys are too much...

Peter Shih is a very good friend of mine. He's originally from Taiwan but has been in USA since the age of 6. Met him in the Algorithms class...one helluva brain this guy has! Give him any problem anywere and he'll come up with at least 2 different solutions to the problem.

No wonder then, that he is the Chief Strategist for the UMR Solar Car Team which placed 4th recently in the recently held solar car race. He led from the front in the $200,000 project to build the solar car...designing power optimization algorithms, weather prediction stuff, et all. The guy spent days and nights holed out in the team garage chipping away at the computer, making the car better. The guy has no qualms about learning stuff which are in no way related to Electrical Engineering (he'a an M.S. student in EE) so long as it makes the car run better.

He loves Indian "curry"...well for him everything is curry of some form or the other :D The last time I went to his place we had excellent pasta! And played on his XBox for hours :)

He'll be back on monday from the race. Will call him over for some spicy rasam!


That's John Chaloupek....my team leader at CTEL. Well, team leader less and friend more. He's the kinda guy they tell you about on TV when talking about the computer revolution. Long hair (usually in a pony tail), long goatee and always wears black !! Black shirt, black trousers, socks, shoes, hat, bag....heck even his umbrella is black :D

Is one of the best programmers I've seen and an extreme caffeine addict. In fact he was the main force behind getting a coffee machine up and running in CTEL. Also works for Dr. T, and has been in the university for 2.5 years now and going strong towards completing 3. Poor John....gets screwed royally by Dr. T in his research.

All that apart, the guy has an amazing sense of humor and most often than not our weekly project meetings turn into a laughing frenzy! Met him in the algorithms class as well and he was usually the one sitting with a blank look on his face just like me :D Converted any and all of Peter's algorithms into C++ just for the heck of it. Is originally from Czechoslovakia but he too moved here at the age of 6.

Hope he gets started on his thesis soon...

Why Computers Sometimes Crash!

Read this aloud. It's off an email I got...one of those few I decided to read instead of deleting. Whoever wrote this is a freakkin genius.........

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, and the bus is interrupted at a very last resort, and the access of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, and the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, and your data is corrupted cause the index doesn't hash, then your situation's hopeless and your system's gonna crash!

If the label on the cable on the table at your house, says the network is connected to the button on your mouse, but your packets want to tunnel to another protocol, that's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall, and your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss, so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse; then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang, 'cuz sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang!

When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy in the disk, and the macro code instructions is causing unnecessary risk,then you'll have to flash the memory and you'll want to RAM your ROM, and then quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom!

LOL...

Wanna go home.........soon!

Life for the last few weeks has been pretty down! My routine - up...lab...lunch...lab...chat...still in lab....down! And invariably the up is just 3 hours away from the down time :( There were times when I didn't even see my roomies for a few days! The only social contact are with the bunch of guys in my lab...who are busy with their own work anyways. There's a joke going around that my biological clock runs on Indian time...well it's sorta true :)

I finished one year away from home this July and all of a sudden I'm begining to miss it a lot! It gets worse when a bunch of newbies arrive on campus all hyper to be in Uncle Sam's land. They are standing there talking about home and friends and the local dhaba. It get's so frustrating...feel like welding their mouths shut. But then, even I must've been a "hyper-diaper" (That's what I call all the newbies) when i came in.
:D But, I'm the senior now and that has it's own perks. Like asking the guy to handover all homemade food to us! And then devouring it in a jiffy.

I just absolutely need to get back home to India...real fast....@warp speed even. Have a lot of catching up to do! India, here I come...soon, sometime.

3 posts old and already taking a break...

I'm just 3 posts old and yes...I'm taking a break. No personal reasons, just going to freak out in Florida for a few days. Be back in some time :D

Will see a freakin beach after 10 months...mannnn how I miss the beaches of Bombay.