Come on everyone! Include the Taj Mahal as one of your Top 7 choices on the following website:

http://www.new7wonders.com/index.php?id=409

The website has instructions on how to vote. You need to pick out 7 monuments among the 21 listed and submit your votes. The last information I received indicated that the Taj Mahal was in the top 10 but not the top 7. Apparently, not enough people are voting for the Taj. So, I’d like to request everyone to please include the Taj Mahal as one of your choices for the New 7 Wonders of the World.

I haven’t really posted anything since my PT concert review. In the meantime, I have come back home to India and am relaxing. It’s hot with temperatures hitting 46 degree Celsius (110F +) but not that bad when you stay indoors. The primary reason I haven’t posted is that I’m theme-hunting once again. I like the current default (Fluidity3c) and I thought I could mod it and get it to look better. But my attempts yielded nothing good so I abandoned that plan and went looking for a new theme altogether. I uploaded and then discarded quite a few for varying reasons and at this point, only one survives (AbstractGreen). It hasn’t been modified in any way, not even the header. Design-wise, I like it but the colors are too bright and the header is ginormous. If I can suddenly discover motivation, I can modify it and use it. But that might take time. Have patience!

I didn’t just waste all my time searching for new themes. I also went ahead and redesigned (somewhat) the header over at TechSpot Forums to make it look neater and we added the Arcade back. I have also been posting news on the main site so make sure to check it often for updates and the latest in technology!

Out.

Ladies and Gentlemen (Neil Peart drumroll): TechSpot.in v2.0 is now available!! We have not only updated the forum with a new theme and a spanking new Market Place section for our members to buy and sell goodies, but we have also added a customized news portal to our home page. If you log on to www.techspot.in, you will see a portal with a custom-made theme and the pick of the news. There is no copy-paste involved here folks. In fact, we are one of the first Indian websites to post customized news articles, unlike some of those other “reputed” and “popular” sites you might have heard of. The fun doesn’t stop there. You can post comments and discuss the posted news within the portal itself! Post your opinions on the latest news and see what others have to say about it.

So come visit the new and improved TechSpot.in v2.0 and let us know how we’re doing! We are constantly listening to our members and adding features to our website. Allow us to tickle your TSpot.

The last post left off with me crashing to bed after I couldn’t stay awake to watch a Bond movie. The next morning, I woke up fairly late. There were a few presentations that I did want to go to but again, the bus schedules were such that I didn’t feel like it. Also, we wanted to go into the city after missing out on the previous two days due to exhaustion and laziness. So, around 12pm, we set off for San Francisco.

This time, we took a ferry from a different port and boy was the port beautiful! It was very cloudy and was drizzling but that didn’t take anything away from how pretty the place was. By the time we got into San Fran, things were clearing up and it looked like a beautiful day. And yes, the stalker returned. He was on the exact same boat as us. Who thought he’d go and take the ferry from the same place we did on the one day we decided to take it from there? He was on the boat and very near us. Kind of jostled with us for space to click photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz.

This stalker business was getting worrisome. We got off the ferry and went to the MUNI station to hop onto a street car in order to get to Fisherman’s Wharf. We walked around the Wharf a bit, ate an expensive lunch and then walked some more. It’s a lovely place and if you like sea food, this is paradise. Us vegetarians need to be content with bread and soup. It was getting late and we had to catch the 4:30pm ferry back to the hotel, so we got onto another streetcar to take us to the ferry terminal again. Riding a streetcar is a lot of fun! Most of them in San Fran are decades old and you can see the vintage machinery that they run on! It’s a unique experience since you get to ride on a streetcar on the same road as other cars and buses.

We managed to get on the ferry back and then bundled into the hotel’s shuttle to get to our bus. The bus took us to the airport and we sailed through check-in and security. We had a couple of hours of waiting time so I decided to peek into some shops. I also read a bit before getting dinner for later. As you might remember, domestic flights in the US don’t give you any food. American was pretty bad but surprisingly, Delta was decent. They gave us small boxes with some snacks. The plane was one of the good ones with an LCD behind every seat and trivia games and satellite television. I got addicted to the trivia game but couldn’t manage to beat this one guy MIKE. Once he left, I was winning but a bad touchscreen response meant I somehow exited the game before it was over. I was pissed!! I just to sleep after that. Before we landed however, I did manage to sneak a win! We landed to a thunderstorm brewing. We were very worried about not making it to NY because of the impending thunderstorm but luckily, we landed before it got worse. I got back to my room and almost immediately went to sleep. It was 8:30am! I woke up 5 hours later.

What happened to the stalker you might ask? I didn’t see him after getting off the ferry. So, whatever. All in all, a fun trip. I fell in love with San Francisco. It has the big city feel without being crowded like NYC. Maybe I will get another chance to go there and spend more time. For now though, this is the end of this series. Done. Move along!

So let’s move on with the chronicling.

I woke up at 6:30am and took a shower. I ate the continental breakfast delivered to my room before rushing out to catch the bus to the university. The bus schedules were idiotic. Buses only operated between 6:45am and 10:00am and then between 4:00pm and 6:30pm. That meant that if you were presenting at 3pm like I was, you had to go before 10am and STAY there until after your session got done. So I was at the university from 8am to 5pm that day.

We got to the university and got on line to register for the conference. It was a nice campus - very green. They gave us a bag, a name tag, a bottle of water, conference schedules, and guess what, a temporary tattoo with the conference logo on it! So exciting! After getting all that swag, me a friend decided to explore the campus. We spent some time in the library computer lab. Sat around and took pictures of the pretty campus. Then we went to lunch. I was surprised that the vegetarian lunch pack was actually pretty good. After lunch, we just sat around going over our conference presentations and making sure we knew what we were talking about.

At around 2:45pm, I went to my assigned room and waited there. I was up first in the 3pm session. My presentation finally started and I thought I went over it fairly well. I still had time left when I finished because I didn’t get any time warnings (2 minutes or less). I got three questions. The first two were good and I think I was able to provide satisfactory answers. The third one, well, I don’t think I quite understood what the question was. I tried my best to explain it but obviously my answer wasn’t what he was looking for. Thankfully, a couple of people in the room that understood him bailed me out. HUGE THANKS!!!!

The guy was a professor from SUNY Brockport and it seemed he was on a mission to harass everyone that day. Three more presenters after me got a question from him. Each question was equally confusing and the students obviously weren’t quite sure how to answer him. I was in good company. The last guy in the session was this professor’s student. And guess what, the professor kept his mouth shut. Quite what was expected. Was he trying to sabotage everyone else’s presentation to make his guy’s look good? I thought so. But, his student got a question that he answered incorrectly!! The professor had to stay shut because he was his adviser. I found that to be some kind of retribution.

My session got out at 4:40pm and I met up with my buddies to get on the bus back to the hotel. We were too tired to want to go into the city again. Hence, we just got a quiet dinner at the hotel restaurant and went to our rooms. I did some homework and reading that was due. I think my friend just passed out. We decided to go to the conference a little later the following day since there was nothing we wanted to see in the morning. We checked out posters in the two afternoon sessions after grabbing lunch and a bunch of stupid pictures. Some of our school-mates were presenting so we were there to encourage them.

I saw a couple of really cool posters: one by an EE student from Columbia showing a voltage generator using alternative solid state devices that can produce steady voltages for use as references and another one on two-photon spectroscopy that produced a blue laser from two near-infrared lasers. They weren’t ready to call it a laser yet because of the nature of it’s production. But it looked like one!! And they were using the same kind of rubidium cell that we use in our lab as well as a laser at 780nm just like us. So that was quite fun!

The Guy Who Stalked Me

So you’re probably wondering why all these posts are (will be) called The Guy Who Stalked Me. Well, because a guy did stalk me. When I was reading the first poster, this dude from Milwaukee comes up and starts asking the poster guy some questions. Now these two are EE majors and I took one EE class. But I found the conversation interesting and hung around until it was done. We thanked the presenter and walked away. While roaming around aimlessly, I bumped into that same guy again. All right, we were in the same area so that wasn’t alarming.

Then, I went up to the second poster and was reading it when this guy shows up and starts asking questions again. This time though, I knew more about what was going on and most of his questions were boring. But I waited for my turn and asked some questions of my own. And then, finally, I left the poster and went to hang out with my friends. After the poster session was done, we walked out of the poster hall and started going to the cafeteria to get food. The guy was walking behind us.

We had the special “Mexican Fiesta” dinner and had plans to go into the city after that. But we got lazy and played table-tennis and ate dinner at the hotel restaurant again. Then we trooped over to a friend’s room to watch a Bond film. I was way too sleepy to hang around even though they were watching Living Daylights. I went to bed.

Part III to follow.

Pictures:

Link 1

Link 2