Siddharth's Blog

Time is flying once again!
Been a long time since I updated my blog. Suffice to say that its been busy time and time very well spent! :) Enjoyed the last weekend of my stay at the US, roaming around Dallas with Parag Dada and shopping in Amsterdam on the way back. Was happy to be back in time for Vrushali's birthday. Then came the elaborate house hunt.... feeling good about the fact that we have finally found a nice place for rent that we will be occupying after the wedding. Everything is going fast since time is a rare commodity at present.

Ubuntu Linux rocks
Managed to screw up my Fedora box at work by trying to be too much on the bleeding edge using RPM updates. That led me to finally ditch incremental updates and do a clean install of the Linux partition. Thought would try this new distro this time around, especially since loads of folks have been going gaga about it. And I whole heartedly join them.... Ubuntu Just Works (TM). Gnome 2.8.1 with Evo 2 is up and running on my desk with no manual tinkering at all. Synaptic is a pretty neat package manager too. I'll stick to the official mainstream upgrades this time around and wait for the 6-monthly release. It can't be all that tough ;)

Things to do when you are homesick.
Spend a whole afternoon in the mall looking at things for the home and for family. Return to the apartment, cook, read a book for a little while, browse and watch TV. If you are lucky to find something worth watching for once, make the most of it. That's what I've done so far. Seen several movies on the trot today: Freaky Friday, Honey, 8 Mile, Under the tuscan sun. I found all of them okay in one way or the other. But the pick was 'Under the tuscan sun'.

Amazing.
Every once in a while, there is a report on Slashdot that is truly news to me and is totally amazing. Never heard anything like that before, never seen anything like that before. The Ig Nobel Awards site reported today falls into that category. Weird, funny and interesting all at the same time. Or maybe.... anything that is weird and funny automatically falls into the third category. I think I might have found a research topic for the next year's nominations ;)

PS: My pick from of links originating from the site: the 5 second rule and the Gorilla in our midst paper.