‘Ere we go!

Greetings! It has been eight months. And so many events did come to pass that all writing was temporarily shelved. As you can probably calculate from earlier posts, intelligent reader, that my MS is over.

First please read this post in my friend Dinesh Kapur’s blog. It is quite brilliant.

Also these are the two published papers of mine archived on the internet [1] and [2]

They are linked to my Master’s project, read them if you are a little interested in cognitive science.

Before we continue to the main post (which will be short and completely random) there are a few important things I wish to inform, summarizing the last eight months (a poor excuse for eight posts, I know).

1. In January I did realize (too late) that 18 credits was insane.  I don’t know how I survived advanced compilers in spring, from thinking I would flunk in the beginning to getting an A at the end, events were completely not in my control. Regardless I got to code some hardcore C and also I became acquainted with the Linux environment. My machine learning project was quite sleep depriving as well. Let us not even get into what or how the MS project was.

2. My father passed away. In May end. Although I’m certain I have managed to inform most of you guys, this is for any friend left out of the loop. He was young and  it was completely unexpected and a bad shock. I was in India for five days in June first week, and I was in India for a month from June end to July end, after having taken care of all my degree requirements. If for some reason I haven’t been able to inform anyone in my immediate circle, my sincere apologies, stuff was quite chaotic at that time.

3. My PhD application got rejected. This happened in June mid. I had an inkling that this might happen due to the lack of significant work exp, and yet was completely unprepared emotionally. Naturally this coupled with the earlier thing left me practically nonfunctional for weeks, so I recovered my wits and have been looking for jobs since a month. The plan is to reapply for PhD some time in the future with loads of relevant work exp. Since my profile now is exponentially better with three published papers (not to say a 4.0 GPA from Gatech) I expect this time things ought to go correctly. I returned to Atlanta in August first week.

4. It seems May to August spelt doom for not only me but my gf. Due to circumstances beyond her control, she ended up in Infy of all places. Well it gave me a reason to visit Mysore for a week. The place seriously needs to get better autowallas (and an airport).

5. My graduation ceremony in August 6 was brilliant and sad. Brilliant because it was a Georgia Tech commencement (what else can you expect), sad because I missed my gf, my few friends and my mother a lot.

6. A lot of other stuff happened, especially in spring. I can write essays about the MS project but all that seems somewhat shallow now. A few other incidents happened which are best left alone. In short I had an interesting life the past eight months.

That takes care of the standard flashbacks. Moving on to a completely random topic

I got majorly acquainted with Warhammer 40k this year. Before ’09 I was a complete stranger to the game, but accidentally got into it, and thus got another random insanity into my hobby list. I’m quite addicted now, the fluff is addictive, thinking of buying and painting my own Tau army. The game is too big to describe here… You’ll just have to take my word that it defines awesome. The tvtropes page for warhammer 40k is just the place to introduce yourself to the franchise. After that wiki it for the details.

Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

In short the ‘good guys’ in WH40k are a race which will commit genocide or orbital bombardment if you don’t choose to join them, the others will just commit genocide without bothering to ask, eat you up, sterilize the surface of all life, or kill you for the fun of it. And the humans are for a change neither omnipotent, nor good, but as bad as the others. Then there are the SPESS MEHREENS Interested? find out more yourself. WH40k makes the Empire of Star Wars look weak.

It is the kind of universe where these guys are the comic relief

And I really do hope you all know what tvtropes is right?? That site is at times better than Wikipedia.

That is all folks, for now. I know this post was not up to scratch. Lot of things are happening, I’ll also get employed soon and there will be loads of interesting things to write about. Wishing you all pleasant times.

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