In the end, I lost out my “contacts and categories” in the new space!! Although I will still have this site up and running, I will be updating here from now on. And exactly three years after I wrote my first post here, I decided to move on again….

I have a 50-70 page report to submit for my final project, not to mention the presentation slides and the model I need to build, before I do that. Another two reports - one of 5 pages and the second, 20-30 pages for my second course and further two reports - 40 and 20 pages each - complete my next 3 weeks. That makes it a total of 145 - 175 pages to literally type before I graduate!! And having not thought about it till date was perhaps the biggest mistake I did.

Now getting back to the conversation I had today, apparently there are several ways of increasing the number of pages of your report rather phenomenally. One of the suggestions I got was increasing the character spacing, which means, even within a word, the spacing between the characters can be increased from say 1 to 1.3, to produce a significant difference, without actually making it noticeable. Add on increased margin size and this would be just perfect for a 50 page long report.

But perhaps the most interesting suggestion I got today was to increase the font size of just the periods (full stops) and commas. Punctuation takes up a lot of space after it, in word documents. So even a minor change from a font size of 12 to 14 would drastically alter the number of pages. Strenuous as it seems, this might not be a bad idea especially for a person like me, who tend to shorten sentences and descriptions to as minimal words as possible, and often find it difficult to meet the annoying page requirements.

Back in school at the end of March, it has been the same routine, shuttling between class and work, still trying to find a balance between the two, I must admit. However I do have a mini plasma light and a confession to keep me company.

Offbeat: I just started a blog called Idle tech thoughts . I’ve been thinking about it for quite sometime now, ever since I started studying again, which means it has been two years since I started thinking about it. The plan was huge and I guess this is just an effort to start off and build on it as I go on.

Offbeat: This is the first picture that Im posting here, which I shot through my iPhone

And I kept shooting more …

and more …

Feb 14th, 2007 was when it snowed the most last winter - so much that the college was closed for a day, with frostbite warnings floating around in mails. That day this year is just a day away

And this is my family!

The distortion in the photograph can be blamed on the excitement and the bouncing bed, in my room!

There were somethings, I wished I could do, and somehow they never happened. But like the wise men from the mountains say, when you leave a place, you should always leave somethings undone. It makes you want to come back again.

This trip in an auto was followed by a memorable trip, to “mark a remarkable” end to 2007. The journey from Salem to Bangalore that day, on a rickety bus (living up to how Ruskin Bond described it once, in every sense) with a D”u”d player, was truly “religious”, thanks to the movie on Lord Shiva acted by Shivaji Ganeshan!

Bangalore brought in a lot of memories. The three years I spent there will always hold a special place in my heart (and perhaps in the autobiography that I plan to write later ). Those were the first three years of my financial freedom. Although I always lived on monthly paychecks, thanks to the impulse buy nature of mine, this was the city which taught me how to live with whatever little you had. It taught me to “stand” on my own feet. And, a return to this city was something I always looked forward to. Add on a whole group of friends and family I had in this city, the visit became even more special. Nostalgia would be a wrong word to use here. I relived every single moment - from living in the apartment with the same group of people to traveling by autos, from coffee places to late night tea stalls and Death by Chocolates, from PVR Cinemas to Crossword bookstores, what all and what not. It almost felt like I needed more time in the city! Words always failed me when I had a whole bunch of emotions running through me. And it happened again this time…

This was where I made my first telescope (well that was the only one till date too ). Nostalgia hit me the moment I stepped onto the quad where stood the Newtons, Galileos, Aryabattas and Einsteins (sculptures of course ) - the path I took everyday on my way to the library. I sat beside Newton, staring at the apple that fell on him, trying to figure out gravity. I traced the star pointed to by Galileo, wondering if that was something I could have found through *my* telescope.

I then walked into the library complex, which housed the famous Foucault’s Pendulum . I remember standing in front of it waiting to see it change its direction of swing at least a little only to find that it always did when I went out for lunch! I spent almost an hour or two there, trying to relive those moments I’ve had. It was indeed refreshing.

PS: I wish I had not forgotten to bring along the cable for my camera, to transfer the pics on to my laptop!!

The meter system in the autorickshaws in Pune are a little weird compared to the ones I have seen in the rest of the country. I wouldn’t consider myself to have seen them all, but the little that I have seen, this certainly proved to be the strangest. Unlike most other places, the meter reading here does not directly indicate the amount we need to pay. Instead, it gives you a number, which when multiplied by 6 and then incremented by 3, will give you the amount!! So much for technology laying emphasis on user-friendliness he he.

Coming back to my first statement, I was with a group of physicists yesterday, and we happened to board an auto. Although I have not done much justice to engineering, I would still call myself an engineer. So that makes us 2 physicists and an engineer. Having reached where we were supposed to have reached, we looked at the meter which read “3.50″. We all started calculating the amount as we were getting down from the auto - a simple math, (3*6 + 0.50*6 + 3). To our surprise, even before we calculated what 0.50*6 would be, the auto driver was ready with the answer!!

I just stood there wondering how talented *we* Indians are

Offbeat: I did manage to find a “used” phone. Well, it took a little while trying to convince my mother to buy a new phone