The End of House

I just heard that this would be the last season of House MD. I've been a fan of a lot of TV series for quite a long time now. House MD was one of the early series I began following. I remember watching it as long ago as my second year at BITS, probably even before I had watched even a single episode of FRIENDS. Gregory House was very well portrayed by Hugh Laurie, and I had great difficulty accepting he had been a stand up comedian before stepping into the role of the enigmatic and brilliant diagnostician. I had to actually see him act in "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" to believe it!

I can (proudly) say that I've watched every single episode of the series, starting right from the mysterious doctor who never saw his patients, yet diagnosing them correctly with his team of excellent multi-disciplinary doctors to accepting his Vicodin addiction and checking himself in to get better, to getting into a relationship with Cuddy (only avid fans know how long they had to wait to see it happen) and finally crashing a car into her apartment as an outburst of emotion and thereafter serving jail time.

The makers of House were successfully able to keep the audience hooked to the series with offering insight into new aspects of House's life with every new season, but that could last for only so long. After Cuddy left the series, it just wasn't the same anymore, with the new team not bringing enough to the table as Cuddy and Cameron did, and House running out of facets of his life to enthrall the audience with.

As with many other things, sometimes the best way to show that one cares is by ending something at the correct time, when things are still good, than wait unnecessarily and impose oneself till things turn sour. I'm glad that the makers of House hit a sweet spot with respect to when to end the series. It was about time when the series was growing quite repetitive and monotonous, with no real character development to speak of. Ardent fans still followed it, but there really was nothing new or interesting happening. It was nice to see that they cared enough to end it before it became a drag like some of the series that started around the same time.

I'll always remember House MD as one of the most inspiring series I've watched, with interesting, well thought out characters and an amazing storyline, right till the end. A big thanks to everybody who contributed to the making of this series.

Home

"Home is where the heart is" so they say. I've had three "homes" now - Mumbai, Goa and Los Angeles (maybe Bangalore is another.... but no.... not so much)

Every home has been a new step is learning - about myself, about the world.

Mumbai - with my family and the earliest of friends and classmates, most of whom are no longer in Mumbai any more... just like me...

Goa - my undergrad, the second rung. My first home away from home, new directions, new ideas, complete independence without the strain of daily chores... A place to discover yourself and where you want to go...

And finally, Los Angeles - A new place, a new country. I've been here for the longest away from Mumbai - one year today, having not been home. Getting a little homesick, but I'll be traveling back soon enough! Los Angeles - responsibility for all of yourself - not just living in a hostel, but an apartment, taking care of EVERYTHING yourself, from your food to your academics.

I long to be in Mumbai - my first and dearest home, for just a little bit. To re-live the sights, sounds and smells of the place I grew up...

Retro Music Videos

End of another exhausting quarter.

I'm in retro mode today, so no gyaan or introspection, just YouTube links of old videos.

Enjoy!

Woh Chali Woh Chali - Bombay Vikings

Mona Re - Bombay Vikings

Channa Vey - Kunal Ganjawala

Kya Soorat Hai - Bombay Vikings

Aashiq Banaya Aapne - Himesh Reshammiya

Calcutta (Taxi, Taxi, Taxi) - Dr. Bombay

Sayonee - Junoon

Aankhon Mein Tera Hi Chehra - Aryans

Just Around the Corner

And as the quarter approaches its end, only the last leg is left. The last couple of assignments and exams and submissions. The last two days have been quite interesting. Yesterday was the submission deadline for the third homework of Algorithmic Game Theory. I was clueless as usual, offering my 20 cent worth ideas wherever I could. My group has a couple of really talented individuals who just concoct solutions for the homework problems out of nowhere. Really admirable.

I also played a lot of foosball yesterday during the assignment. I was surprisingly good at it, more so than usual. I was basically on a foosball high, beating everyone left, right and center. Today, is unfortunately different. Just lost a game 1v1 with a person I would probably defeat on any given day.

But today is special. Not because I wrote a lot in the seminar course, so that making a summary for submission would be easy, not because a fire alarm rang during class today and that we had to evacuate the building, but because I got my first dollar value paycheck today. Just made a scan of it as a souvenir and then deposited it into my checking account. Probably, this would be the first and only paycheck, and I've set up direct deposit, which will take effect as soon as I receive my SSN.

Also, I went shooting with a friend yesterday to the botanical garden. I was pleasantly surprised to find it a nice quiet environment for introspection. I think I'll be using it in the future, the only downside being that it is open only during working hours. Anyway, back to the point, the photography assignment this week of nature, and I got quite a number of good shots. I've been slacking off on the assignments lately due to a lack of time and motivation, and it felt good to hold my camera in my hands again.

The class is in half an hour, I have a lot of work to do, but I wanted a good break, so I thought I should update my blog as I haven't done so in a while. Kind of a random post, this one.

Time to decide what to spend my pay on!

Later then.

Pushing the Limits

It's been a busy busy quarter. I've taken 3 courses, one of them is really difficult. Add to that, a friend convinced me to join a Digital Photography course, which I really wanted to since a long time (extra curricular, of course) and I've been trying to play Racquetball as much as possible (try to make it everyday)

More recently, I got an on-campus job, which is great, but it seems to be pretty intense (and fun!) It started just yesterday, but as it turns out, it's cutting into my study/fun time and has begun to affect my humor even before becoming a full-swing part of my schedule.

I think I'm doing too much, but as it turns out I have been very complacent lately, and haven't been challenging myself enough. I take this as an opportunity to push my limits to see if and when I reach breaking point. It's really difficult, and I've not even been getting enough sleep (and food?). I can't believe I overslept, and almost missed my 8am class today. That's almost never happened before.

I intend to keep up this charade, until the quarter is over or I break, whichever comes first. It'll be a miracle if I'm able to sustain myself with all these till the end of the quarter, and I'll come out as a really strong, albeit crazy person. If not, I don't think there's any shame dropping an activity or two from the above.

People around me have been challenging themselves continuously and I need to do the same to find my limits. I think I'll know when to stop as soon as I see bright spots before my eyes and feel the fatigue that I haven't felt since a really long time.

Later then!

A Magical Class

Finally, something happy to write, after all the droning I've been doing for the past few posts...

So... most of my days are spent wondering what the #$%@ am I doing here. The classes are dull, there are way too many papers to read, and there is actually not enough time to digest all the material that we read. I think it would be better if there were fewer papers, but they were discussing in depth. However, such is grad school...

Anyway, so after a couple of weeks of classes where nothing special happened, and I was very unmotivated, something really interesting happened today. In the CS219 class, someone thought that the professor was out of town, attending a conference, so he spread the news that the class was going to be conducted by a TA. Result: half the class was absent. However, this was a very nice thing to happen.

As usual, the class started with a student volunteer presenting a paper. The professor seems to be in a really good mood, and was asking him a lot of questions about the paper. The student was trying his best to answer. The discussion was quite animated, and even some of the students, including me, chipped in discussing various extensions and applications of the paper, the drawbacks, advantages, etc. sometimes questioning the student, and sometimes helping him...

Then, we had a quick break, which I and a fellow student spent discussing some more with the professor, which was cool!

Finally, the professor presented a couple of new concepts and discussed another paper. Surprisingly, he was asking some simple fundamental questions to random students in the class. A couple of times he asked me too. Thankfully, I could answer them successfully. At some points of time, I even got the feeling that I was actually conversing with him in front of all the students. This feeling was exhilarating, and I felt like I connected with the professor on a completely new level! Something this profound normally doesn't happen, and I was delighted that it happened with me...

The class was perfect simply perfect, there were a lot of discussions, a lot of ideas thrown around. It was fulfilling.... and it is such classes that get me through the quarter, making my life feel worth something.

I yearn for many more magical classes like this.

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!