Getting Interested

Originally Posted: June 9, 2011

 

I am not too good at selecting titles, but this one is interesting. I recently wrote a post called getting bored which did not get a good response. People perhaps found the post boring. What else could they have expected from a bored person? But things are changing now. I am getting involved and getting interested in things, people and places around. I have suddenly developed a liking for the work I do, I have started interacting with people, I know more about the group I work with, I did some shopping over  the weekend, got a Google Nexus S to work with for sometime, and what else. And yes, more importantly and strangely, I could give directions to a car that stopped by at a red light.

I have so much to tell you, and do not know where to get started. Let us get started with the Stanford Experimental Data Center Lab retreat. Forget it now. Let us call it the retreat from here on. It was a conference where different works going on in data centers were presented and discussed upon by people from academia and industry. I attended it last weekend. And as people from big companies like Google, Facebook, NetApp etc were involved, it was quite obvious for us to get grand dinner and luxurious rooms to live in. I loved the place, lovely place on the shore of pacific ocean. I got to meet new people, people from my own research group , people whom I had never with interacted before and they turned out to be good, caring people. Let me name them for you: Abdul, Vimal, Alizade, Shuang. I guess I have named others before. Remember the previous post? Where I devoted some special space for Naini and Jiang. Abdul and Vimal would have made there too had I known them before. Also, I got to know about how industry dictates research and research dictates industry. Loved the experience. While coming back, I had a great scenic ride. One side of the road had the pacific and the other had mountains and soon we crossed some lake which was above a fault line. Again a visual pleasure.

Also, I have a camera now, and a handycam, and a Google Nexus S. I believe its time for me to write a picture post. More of images and less of words. I am very bad at photography I must say. But one day, during the summer I will write a picture post. pakka promise. I missed the camera on my trip there though.

Back to Palo Alto(that’s the place where I live), things seem pretty good here. I have started cooking, I cook pretty decent. Now, had I been onto that last post, I could have written about burnt fingers and jali hui roti. But now, I will talk about delicious mix veg, awesome sewaiyyan, gol roti, and tasty rajma. Special thanks to Brownies, HoneyBuns and Swiss rolls for making up my breakfast. People staying in hostel would be jealous , I know. But it is how things are. You work hard to cook, but you eat delicious food at the end. I even pack lunch for myself.

Let us end this with talks of work. Work is worship after all. I had believed the work I had got, held little importance. But somehow, over the last few days, I have realised how important things are and how hard I will have to work over the next few days. But today, I have taken out some time to write something, for I had once made a promise that I will write every week.

Finally, good news. Khoj, the NGO, opened a daycare centre for street kids at Ber Sarai. Good job Khoj. Congratulations. It had always been a dream for all of us. I know I am not finished yet, but I don’t intend to give you a long post.

Signing off

Deepak

P.S: This is the third part in the series of posts about my intern at Stanford. Read the first and second if you haven’t already.