So, they finally gave me the AC room I had asked for.  Just moved all my stuff in today - I won’t bore you guys with how much of a pain this was since I already ranted about it 23 days ago.  The room’s nice and the AC is awesome!  As temperatures are starting to creep up, this move has come at just the right time.  While nothing compared to North India, it does get kinda hot here in the summer.  From what I gather (weather.com: where else), the temperatures will range between 30-35 degrees C with the occassional spike up to 38-40.  This is also the start of the hurricane season with the first storm, Alberto, coming in a few days back.  Maybe the hurricanes will bring rain and cool weather.

Research is going along fine.  We’re currently testing out our vacuum pumps.  The first pump worked well and now we’re testing the second one which takes us down to Ultra-High Vacuum.  Things were kinda stagnating so we decided to heat the damn vacuum chamber in an attempt to bring down the pressure.  It seems to have worked since I checked on it today and it was lower than on Friday evening.  Hopefully, it will fall further by the time we return to work on Monday morning.  Also working on some stuff for the imaging system.  Hopefully, by the end of the July, we should have a simple atom-trap going.  That reminds me, I gotta start planning for my Thesis pretty soon.

I’m thinking about the future of this website.  I might go ahead and stick with Dreamhost but I might wanna share half the webspace/bandwidth with someone.  Heck, I might even start a joint website with a friend.  Still have about a month to work things out.  Hopefully, this website will stay as it is or survive in some form or the other.  Countdown to Fall 2006 stands at 68 days.  If I can move in to my room earlier than that, then, well, the countdown would probably stand at 64 or something.

Weekends are boring.  During the week I got lots of stuff to do.  Even meet some of my friends who’re working/taking classes during the summer.  But come the weekend, and I’m suddenly without anything to do.  Maybe I should go out to the city one of these weekends.  Hey, I did make $30 today tutoring Physics.  I’ll probably make the same amount tomorrow as well when the student returns.  Hopefully, Wal-Mart will deliver my fridge by Tuesday.  I can then finally get some better food - kinda getting bored of simple rice and pasta.  Need to go to Patel Brothers once the fridge is here.  Will get some frozen Indian food.  Hell Yeah!!

Now SCRAM!!! I gotta go make my bed.  Still have some unpacking to do.  Screw it.  I’ll do it tomorrow.  Wait.  Brazil play tomorrow.  Damn.  Oh well.  Hopefully the Australians don’t have any more surprises left.

So I went to see Pearl Jam yesterday. This happens to be my first concert experience in the US and boy did it blow me away.  Pearl Jam are amazingly good with their live performances and they played almost all of the songs I wanted them to play! They even played “Once” which is undoubtedly my favorite.

My Morning Jacket was the opening band and they were prompt - started playing at exactly 7:30pm and went on for about 45 minutes.  They’re a good band and worth checking out - especially the songs “Wordless Chorus” and “The Way He Sings.”  Then there was a bit of a break to get PJ’s stuff setup.  Right before they came on, the intro music to Once started playing.  Me and my friend thought, OMG!!  They’re starting with Once.  Unfortunately that was just an intro.  They actually started off with Severed Hand from the new album and some funky laser stuff.  The crowd was pretty vocal with everyone singing along and clapping.  Other songs they played included World Wide Suicide, Even Flow, Jeremy, Dissident, Not For You, Army Reserve, etc.

They went off and then came back for the first encore.  They started it with slow songs but then broke away into Once which happens to be one of the 3 songs they first wrote as a band.  Man that was freakin’ awesome!  And then they followed it up with Alive which had the entire audience swaying and singing and clapping.  They came back for a second encore which was also great and they wrapped up the concert with Indifference.

A lot of times, they were playing songs where everyone seemed to know the lyrics and we were standing there trying to figure out which song it was.  At the midway point of Even Flow, Mike McCready took his guitar, put it behind his head and was playing it with armsbehind his head.  Later on, Eddie Vedder took his guitar and reflected light onto the crowd.  He went around the entire arena - it was great!  He was drinking wine all the time and was pretty drunk by the end of the concert but this is what he does all the time - it certainly has no negative impact on the songs.  I think the wine helps him keep up at this age and stay energetic throughout the concert.  They are a high-energy act even after 15 years.

All in all, it was a terrific experience.  They played for almost 2.5 hours and add to that the time My Morning Jacket was on and you have a 3 hour concert.  Although, it could’ve been Tool whose concert would’ve been my first, PJ were an amazing first concert.  I still hope I can get Tool tickets when they come back for the second leg of the tour.  Until then, PJ is the best concert I’ve ever been to.

Oh wow!  Has it been that long since I wrote something here?  Damn!  Well, blame it on finals and moving.  First, let me brag a bit.  I managed to pull off the 4.0 this semester.  For the uninitiated, academic performance is measured in terms of GPA (Grade Point Average) and the maximum you can get is 4.0 and where I study, that is only possible if you get A/A+ in all your classes.  Get the drift?  It was a procession of A+’s until I got just A’s in the last two.  Optics was the big relief.  I had scores of 95 and 100 on the first two exams but the final was a disaster.  To put it in the words of my roommate, it was as if everyone had just been anally raped by Optics.  How I pulled off the A in that class is a mystery.  Maybe he dropped the final grade or that I managed to do better than everyone else.  Whatever the reason, I was delighted to see that A.

Moving in/out sucks.  Since I’m staying back over the summer, I had to move into the residence hall designated for summer housing.  It’s only a two-minute walk from where I was housed during the school year but having to move all my stuff over was going to be a nightmare.  Thankfully, my school-year roommate brought over his car and helped me move the stuff to the new room where I would have a new roommate.  While packing all my stuff up, I realized just how much I had accumulated ever since I got here.  I came here with two large suitcases filled to the brim and a smaller carry-on suitcase.  Now, I needed both my suitcases, plus two big boxes full of stuff, plus clothes jammed into my laundry bag, plus three smaller boxes, plus a whole bunch of plastic/paper bags filled with random items.  Add to this the shopping binge towards the end of the semester in an attempt to exhaust my meal card.  The binge resulted in me having to carry a crate of Mountain Dew with 22 bottles (591ml), and 12-packs of other stuff like coffee, vitamin water, and energy drinks.  After 4 hours of intense work (punctuated by a half-hour break when we went to get lunch), we had moved all my stuff and cleaned the room.

The new room’s all right - I certainly miss the suite with it’s common room and bathroom.  There’s still almost 3 months to go (93 days as of May 25th) and it’s gonna be a pain but that’s what you get for wanting to be a research assistant.  Right now I’m in Auburn, Alabama visiting my cousin.  It’s a nice university town and only about 75 minutes out from Atlanta.  Research begins on Tuesday, May 30th.  I’m also teaching freshman physics so I’ll be occupied.  But once it’s nighttime, I’m gonna have very little to do and will need to find food on my own.  I’ll probably cook a bit - I don’t know much cooking but there’s a lot of stuff for people like me.  Pop it into the microwave and you have a meal!  Neat, huh?

I kind of just realized that this is the first time I’m ranting on nothing of interest all you readers.  I shouldn’t promise things such as posting times of the Study in the US series because I never mange to have anything by that day.  But since it’s the summer and I have more time, I might be able to post stuff regularly.  Still wondering if I’ll continue with this hosting - only had one referral so far and that only means $17.  Need to find the remaining $103 from somewhere.  Ad-Sense didn’t do too well. I probably have $2-3.  Anyway, this is all folks!  See you all soon!!

I missed it last year since I had no clue when it was on show. But this year I was determined to go and luckily, it started during my Spring Break. This unfortunately, was the only good thing about the timing of the break. Decided to go to the Auto Show on the 15th hoping that we would avoid the opening day rush as well as the Sunday blues. Although it ended up being very crowded, I think we avoided the worst of it.

So we get to the Jacob Javits Convention Center in NYC and look to buy tickets. We think “Hey lets avoid the lines and buy them from a Kiosk!” Bright idea but unfortunately those kiosks were sponsored by MSN so we had to go on the regular line anyway. One dealer in Manhattan had been kind enough to show off some exotics outside of the regular show floor(s) and there we saw the Lamborghini Murcielago, the new Gallardo Spyder, the Lotus Elise and Exige, a Rolls Royce, a Saleen and new cars by Spyker.

We went inside the main show floor and one by saw all the manufacturer’s we were really interested in. Took a ton of pictures and a few videos courtesy my roommate’s digital camera (Mine has issues) which you will get to ogle at once you are through this little piece of writing. We saw Jaguar, Audi, Mazda, Honda, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, Bentley, Ferrari, Porsche, Pontiac, Saab, BMW, Lexus, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Dodge, Nissan, etc. among others. We then went down to the lower level which had mostly SUVs and specialty cars. This is where we saw Subaru, Mitsubishi, Volkswagen, and more models from manufacturers who were on the main show floor. It took us all of two and a half hours to go through the show and we even skipped a few exhibitors that we weren’t particularly interested in such as Ford, Hyundai, etc.

We had to jostle and fight to get near the Ferraris and I was ecstatic upon seeing the Porsche Carrera and the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren. Dense crowds meant that I was able to sit in on only the 2007 Eclipse Spyder. Wish I could have been inside one of those Italian beauties (not the women you perverts! Although I wouldn’t mind….)

After all that talk on the experience, you can now satiate your wildest desires by peeking at these images. These are not the whole deal - I have uploaded all the images to my Coppermine Gallery. Click here for my Coppermine Gallery. The files have been resized to 1600×1200 to conserve space and bandwidth. A ZIP file has all the videos that we took in case you want to take a look. I have tried my best to rename all the camera pix with the name of the car in question. Some of them I just couldn’t remember so you’ll have to visit the NY Auto Show website to find out for yourself. Some images are blurry and not clear but you can easily blame that on the immense flood of people that we had to tear through to get these images. And yeah, no quips about the images that feature me or else….

Videos

Continuing with my top lists, here’s part 2, possibly the last, which lists some of my favorite music from 2005. Let’s start off with the top music albums.

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