Good things ending too soon?

I don't know about you, but I have bumped into some amazing people. The unfortunate thing being that I get very little time to spend with them. And before you know, life takes you separate ways. Sometimes, there is not even a way to keep in touch. The first such person was Samuel Bächler. He was working in a startup company in India during a summer. We met during a Stallman speech at IISc, Bangalore, India. The dude looked like Chris Martin. The reason for my friend to notice him (besides his 6' 2" height) and start a conversation. We exchanged email IDs and kept in touch for about a couple of months. Must have written a couple of emails in about two months. Just before Sam left back to Switzerland, he invited me to dinner. It was a real amazing dinner. We discussed free software, software startups and even life! It was a very pleasant evening. We met up three or four times in the next week. After that, its just been emails.

After coming to Irvine, I met Ajit Chary. A real piece of work. The fellow is completely into music. His music interests range from S P Balasubramiam to the dark death metal bands from Norway. He has been amazing company. Unfortunately we hardly conversed during the first 8 months of being here. While describing a song by a band called Dragonforce, I noticed Ajit's eyes spark up, smile widening and head nodding. Within a minute we were talking about all the metal gods known to man and making recommendations to each other. We even went to the Iron Maiden concert here in Irvine. That was one hell of a night. Today morning at around 5AM I met him again. It was quite a morning :). But well, he is leaving now too. No clue when I can see him again. Born and brought up in US, 5'10" tall, with the exception of metal devotion, there was probably nothing much common between us. But one thing led to the other and we became pretty close. Choices in life again takes us separate ways.

Another very similar bunch of events made me meet another person but I hardly knew when that started or when it ended. All I can do is tag that event "starbucks".

Life is weird at times. But I guess it was never meant to be straightforward. Maybe we shall bump into each other sooner or later.

Social Divides

Today, Bo Gong, a colleague working with me in the ESL lab gave a send off lunch. He is going to be working with Oracle in Foster City. We had lunch in Souplantation. Nice place. One of the discussions were on social divides and how it is the middle class is the one which tries to be most 'pious' of the lot. Rich people have all the money. They also have all the power to do whatever they want. And there is no one to question their authority. The lower class is an interesting lot. They do not stick to any rules too. Do what they want, the way they want. From what I have observed, being with them a lot in the past few years, the above statement applies perfectly. But there is also a deep sense of honor imbibed into them for matters which are most urgent. It is this simple characteristic which makes their company sometimes really enjoyable and comfortable. They are the kinds of people who would always stick up for you. They are negotiable. At the same time, there are problems of being on the other side. That's when the negotiations become really necessary. But well, most of the times you don't have to worry about that. I had a really good time with my friends. Hanging out with them was fun. I got to see a lot of things, which a protected defense camp (where I stayed before with my family) which I would have never seen before. Maybe that's what they call "Life on the Road". Now I am in Irvine, its a pretty quiet and peaceful place. The last time, I met such people was when I went to the Iron Maiden concert at Irvine Meadows. It was vaguely a 'homely' feeling.

End of Spring

The spring quarter has finally come to an end. It was a very hectic quarter than what i had imagined previously. I took two courses. One on advanced data management and the other one on visual perception. Both provided some interesting insights. Chen Li's classes always turn out to be very interesting and back breaking. At the end of day, you take something home with you. In this course, he divided the entire class into many groups to build tiny modules which were later integrated into a powerful search engine for the UCI domain. Here is the link to the web interface: http://plum.ics.uci.edu:8080/WWW/webui.html

On the lighter side, all of us shot off to grand canyon during the memorial day weekend. This was the first time I got to see the grandoise nature of mountains. It was a really pretty sight. Here are a few photos.





Well, it wasn't all 'happy happy' also :-)