End of Quarter 1 (UCLA Rocks!)

Forgive me for the unimaginative title, but I just had to give a post a title before I actually get around to publishing it...
Now to business...

Phew! It's been a hell of a journey. I'm sure there's a lot of posts online about Grad School and lots of comics too. Let me take some time to describe my last week, and my adventures in the United States.

The last few days of the quarter, tension running high, I had two submissions on the last day of the Fall quarter and both on the minute before midnight on Friday night. The first of the two was an Advanced Operating Systems assignment. We were supposed to do the lab and a challenge problem. I had already done the lab a couple of days before, however, a challenge problem was pending. I like doing challenge problems as although the problems are usually defined (we do have the freedom to come up with our own, but I lack creativity and usually go the textbook approach) how to get around to actually doing them is actually up to us. So even though many people attempt the same challenge problem, the results are often contrastingly different.

The second submission was a project which was in particularly a bad shape, mainly because it was challenging, and as it was quite open-ended, there was no end the project could come to. We wanted to do as much as possible, so in order to get enough done, I and my project team began work and did two successive night-outs in the EGSA (Engineering Graduate Students Association) Lounge, but got our project in shape for submission.

On Thursday, we had an AOS challenge problem demo session. Some of us demonstrated our challenge problems we had implemented. I had not gone prepared to present anything, but ended up doing an impromptu presentation anyway. And yes, there was awesome cake and cold ice-cream!

I also had to do a challenge problem for the last lab, so I spent almost the whole of Friday doing that. I ended up doing a decently good challenge problem, and also implementing the "cp" and "mv" functionality in the shell. Both submissions were done, and the quarter was finally over!

Did it end there? Not quite!!!

A couple of weeks back, I had registered for a ski trip to Lake Tahoe (a bit east of San Francisco) and we had to leave on Sunday morning. As it turned out, since I was going to be in Los Angeles, I hadn't carried too many warm clothes from India. Therefore, I had to go shopping with some friends in order to get a waterproof jacket, some ski trousers and a couple more things from Target. It was late by the time we came back, but I had asked one friend to come over for tea (ended up in being dinner!) We had a pretty amazing time, and by the time we were done, it was around midnight. It was a fitting clelbration for the end of the quarter, and..... I still hadn't packed for the trip!

After packing, I realized that if I slept, I would never be able to wake up in time for the trip, so I chatted some more with the friend I had over for dinner (thankfully, she was online) and ended up sleeping for just one hour, and all the way on the bus to Lake Tahoe.

The next three days were quite amazing, to be honest. I ended up learning how to stop, and how to turn (while on skis, obviously!) and ended up falling around ten times in all. I also got to ride a ski-lift. I finally got to see it snow! That had been one of my dreams. There were also a couple of things I learnt about myself while we were there. We all (60 of us) stayed in a huge lodge and enjoyed spending time together. Turns out, I hate it when there's too many people making a lot of noise or playing load music in the same room, especially if I do not know most of them personally... Thankfully, I had a friend who saw this immediately, and helped me get away from all the ruckus. I should work on my people skills...

The food was awesome, and the staff in charge of the trip was very organized, helpful and a lot of fun. I met a lot of people and made a handful of friends. Around a dozen of us also played Taboo on the day before departure back home till 2:30 am. The game is awesome, and we made it guys v/s gals, which made it even more fun. We tried our best, and I'm happy to note that we won by sever points less than the other team... We had also played a couple of games of Shrink on the previous days which was also fun to play...

The ride back was almost uneventful except for the fact that we saw Lake Tahoe (finally!) and watched a couple of "good" movies.

I thought the fun was over, and could finally look forward to some free time. But no, not quite yet!

Turns out, my roommate's friends had come over for the holidays, so we went to Venice Beach the next day! The water was so cold that we couldn't stay in it for more than a minute. However, me and my trusty DSLR got a decent number of amazing shots of seagulls flying, and of the sunset. Made the trip to the beach so worth it....

As if that was not enough, the next day, all of us went to Universal Studios Hollywood! We went quite late though, and it did not help that it was a rainy day. There were a lot of amazing shows and rides there, and I think it'll take another post to write about all of them, and all the fun we had there.... I finally got my picture taken in front of the Universal Studios globe (one more thing I wanted since a really long time) The studio tour was amazing, the Shrek 4 show was cool, and the Mummy and Jurassic Park rides were thrilling (roller coaster - one which also went backwards for a bit, and Aquadive at Esselworld respectively) We came back at night, and had dinner at Chipotle (yummy!)

It was an amazing end to the first quarter at UCLA with lots and lots of fun, and several gigabytes of pics!

Looking forward to more stuff we'll be doing over the next few days....

Later!