Stories from the road - 1

Woke up to the sound of waves of the bay hitting the rocks and sun peeping from distant mountains. We had breakfast and saw that the west wind was slowly dying. Finally time to go out and do something. We decided to hike up to the Angelitas. Wow! the hike up to the mountain didn’t look too much of a problem from the ground but boy was it difficult. Even more so with the scorching sun and no shade. We made it to the top after about 90 minutes of hiking. The view of bahia from the top was breathtaking, those last 90 minutes of sweat and exhaustion totally worth it. Once on the top we decided to dig out a geocache. It was a difficult one but after half an hour of hunt we finally found it. Had food and water and came down. Coming down was much easier. Once we were back we decided to find another geocache, this was an easier one, hidden in a boat and only took 10 minutes.

                The next thing we did was set up a network between two of Dylan's neighbors. This was fun and we used walkie talkies to communicate between the sites :D. One of the neighbors offered us Sting ray burritos, my first experience of unusual food. It was a little different but totally edible :P.

               For dinner we went to a taqueria and I had the best tacos of my life yet. Came back played the game of life watched Indiana Jones and went to sleep to wake up another beautiful day.

Update

Finally an update :). Have been seriously busy all this time and if you're following me you would notice every time the adjective before the term "busy" gets more and more elaborate. This time I have been seriously busy and I am loving it. I have a direction and I know I am making progress. Personally a few things are shaping up and fingers crossed hopefully they will culminate into something really nice. Its always a good feeling when you have a goal and you know what you are working for rather than just languidly following a shiny object.

                A few things happened over the last few days. I finally took my first step towards learning LaTex. I wrote whole of one my homeworks in it and it was fun and am also trying to learn Beamer. :) . Before that I wrote a report on spyware for one my classes. I really enjoyed working on it and also learnt quite a few things. I have posted some interesting excerpts from that report on my other blog here. Hopefully it will be useful to people .In between all this I also gave a talk on Mahatma Gandhi at Dylan's church. While preparing for the talk I found a very interesting fact about Mahatma Gandhi. He wasn't a particularly good public speaker and this gave me a lot of heart :P .Thomas Jefferson again wasn't a very great public speaker but both of them went on to become leading public figures of their time. So people like me who fret at the very idea of speaking in front of an audience have history to look upon.

As I have said before and I reiterate I am really bad at concluding things so I'll just finish this one abruptly too. Adios!

A Random Walk

Any ideas on, how do you do a random walk in real life? You do what we me and Dylan did yesterday. We wanted to go for a walk and didn't know where to go so we decided not to decide anything at all and leave everything to chance. We started from Alex's and on each intersection made a totally random decision on which way to go :), that's a random walk in real life and it was fun walking without purpose and no destination.

It's been almost a month and a half since I wrote here last that's because I have been keeping quite busy and sadly I don't fore see any respite in the next few days. Writing something was on my list for almost a week so I decided I should take some time out and write something..... anything.

Talking about anything, yesterday was a good day. I had a poster presentation and had to stand next to my poster for three and half hours which almost succeeded in breaking my back, fortunately the presentation got over just before the breaking point. Then we went to the "goat", had coffee and the free pizza at Alex's :). The Tradebot guy who sponsored the pizza was a nice one. I guess Me and Dylan were the only guys there without a resume. PhD students are so easily satisfied, they don't need no jobs, all they need is free pizza :P. Then we did the random walk thingy untill we ran into AJ and the broken car (unrelated events :P) and we talked about the "Rat Attack" in northeast India. That was something I learnt yesterday and I had no clue whatsoever about it. A cycle which occurs every 48 years. Every 48 years millions of rats come, no one knows from where and destroy all the crops. It has an interesting reason which I leave you to explore. After the discussion I went back to the lab and actually worked for sometime till I decided to call it a day and head home and guess what I met Jeremy on my way. Actually he wasn't in my way but you know you sometime have that urge to poke a mad bull and see what it does :P. I kinda like talking to him and listen to how a conservative Christian’s mind works.(..and you thought I had had enough of conservative Hinduism) Well God is one of my favorite topics and I can't resist talking about it. Every time I talk to Jeremy I learn something. How to be patient when someone is talking so highly of something you have zilch beleif in and then how to coerce them into your way of thinking. Was too tired after that so went home listened to Jason Mraz ... I love the geek in the pink live version..had dinner and slept ... to wake up the next morning and write this post. :)
Have fun everybody !