So many things...

... to do and so little time. I want to do so many things, but dont have the time to do all these things. This sucks! But, I am having a great time doing the things that I am. Dat iz gud, mon ami. :-)

I will be graduating soon from Champaign with a Ph.D. Before I do that I have to write a thesis, find a job. I guess there is no escaping from these things.

In addition, I want to setup a wiki where the present passing out batch (there are quite a few of us) can contribute to help out incoming graduate students. This has the blessings of my advisor, who has promised funds (to host it), if required. Good news on this front.

Some of us here want to organize a student conference, along similar lines as LIDS student conference in MIT. (Sorry, the link did not work when I wrote the article, not sure if it works now.) Of course, my advisor and other professors have given their blessings for this project.

I want to take some courses on MIT's OCW. In case, you have not checked it out yet, do check it out. This is a site not to be missed.

It is natural, I guess, that I will be stressed out during some stage of these activities and when this happens, I hope I remember this quote from Shantideva: If it can be remedied, there is no need to be unhappy. If it can't be remedied, what is the use of being unhappy? :-)

Of course, needless to say, these are besides the usual fun activities like have tons of potlucks, go swimming, play board games with lots of friends, play card games, watch movies, and, in general party a lot.

Boston

Boston is one of my favorite cities. (Of course, it pales in comparison with New York.) My advisor spent a year in Boston on a sabbatical and I also have some collaborators in Boston. Predictably, I have made multiple visits to Boston.

Whenever I go there, I invariably have a food splurge, thanks to the excellent set of friends there who know which eateries to pick out. And I stay in the excellent dorms in MIT when I visit Boston. The dorms are very comfortable places, with lots of opportunity to play table-tennis, foos-ball, pool, etc. And I make the most of it.

There is one really cool experience that I wanted to share here. I was waiting at a traffic intersection to cross the street, when I sighted a school bus, full of kids waiting at the intersection. I saw that a kid was waving at me. I promptly waved back, only to see that all the kids on that side of the bus were waving at me! Clearly, every kid thought that I was waving at him/her. This made my day. :-)

E-paper

While looking for something else, I stumbled across so-called electronic paper. Electronic paper is like paper which can be electronically written on. Why is this so different from a computer screen? Well, herein lies the beauty. The computer screens are back-lit. There is a power source behind the screen which is emitting light. Turns out that this is associated with a flicker (caused due to the refresh rate) which the eye cannot bear for long. Electronic paper works in a different way. Imagine a rectangular area filled with tiny balls. Each ball is colored black on one half and the other half is white. When you want a line to be drawn, you just orient the balls in the region to oriented such that the black end shows up. The rest of the balls are oriented so as to show their white end shows up. Sounds simple? The implementation, it seems is not so simple.

Anyway, the exciting news is that Sony has announced their version of electronic paper, Sony reader. This should be in the market sometime in April. Though this is going to be an expensive product initially, I hope that this catches on like wildfire and transforms the publishing market the way Apple iPod transformed the music market.

My friend, Srini and I were discussing the possibilities. They seem pretty endless. Any computer with an Internet connection instantly becomes a virtual library! Libraries will become compact. The amount of paper saved is going to be enormous. There are so many novels that are read only once and never again. All books whose copyrights have expired and are available at Project Gutenberg, for instance can be read without hurting the eyes now. Budding authors need not struggle with publishing houses to get their work published. Reaching out to audiences is so much easier.

Needless to say, there will be a lot of copyright issues that have to be hammered out. How do you ensure that illegal book-swapping does not happen? How do you enforce Digital Rights Management without fiascos like the recent Sony fiasco? Can you differentiate between eastern economy editions and higher-priced western editions?

Well, I hope time will favorably answer these questions. I would love to try out one of these readers in a local store and see if I like these.

Greetings (belated)

First off, wish you all a happy new year. I look forward to this new year earnestly. Resolutions? Yes, I do have a resolution.

Contribute to Wikipedia. I might not have time or the enthusiasm to write articles or even edit articles on Wikipedia, but I can play to my strengths and help Wikipedia out. I browse a lot and come across lots of interesting links. I will keep enriching relevant Wikipedia articles with these links by referencing them.

Talking about interesting links, check out http://www.rocketboom.com. This website hosts a video blog, presented by a really cute, smart, pretty babe, Amanda Congdon. The blogs are quite interesting touching upon news, a bit of quirky Internet phenomena. Highly recommended.

I have had a lot of things on my mind that I wanted to blog about. (Is it okay to use the word blog as a verb? A la, google?) The past few days have been busy alternating between working on my research (a paper deadline) and partying with friends (vacation time for all). This explains my absence from the blog-world. Worry not, for I will return to my old prolific blogging ways soon.