My first flight (as a pilot) !

Flew a plane ! A small piper plane, with the instructor by my side doing the take off and landing parts. But he let me take control above 3000 feet, and we went upto 5-6 thousand feet, did a few turns, admired the view from above and generally had a blast !

Corruption in India

All these news articles of Suresh Kalmadi, Karunanidhi's daughter and Raja in recent times makes me hopeful. I hope the punishment is strict, and the crackdown on others severe as well. 

The Hindu and Julian Assange

I'm reading today's The Hindu newspaper, and found it very interesting to see a picture of Julian Assange reading The Hindu on the front page !

If he read's this particular day's newspaper, he'll basically see himself reading The Hindu in The Hindu ! I wonder if the editors thought this was clever, and are rubbing their hands in glee while enjoying this.

Music in Golden Gate park

We spent a good evening yesterday, listening to good music at the Arthur De Young museum in Golden Gate park. There was a quartet paying the violin, viola and the cello. There was also the SF opera group - just mind blowing! Highly recommend Friday nights at the De Young!
Look out for them at http://funcheapsf.com.

Have rack, will bike.

Having gone back and forth trying to decide on a bike rack for the car, we finally ordered the Allen Trunk mounted bike rack. Walmart helpfully shipped it home for free, and it came all assembled - all for a nice low price of 37$ !

Now, to try it on, test it out and go biking in hitherto unreachable places!

Saw this plane going down :(

I usually come home from work to have lunch, leaving at about 11:45 AM. Today was no different, and I was waiting for a green signal at the intersection of Ralston Ave and Oracle Parkway, when I saw this plane going really low.

Usually, these planes taking off from nearby San Carlos airport fly a little higher than this one; and so I was curious. It was not even going fast, somehow seemed very slow to be airborne. Then, it did a sharp right turn, and went further downwards and out of sight behind a building. I remember thinking someone must be feeling very acrobatic, the way the flight looked from below. I came home and found in Mercury News that the plane crashed into the Redwood Shores Lagoon, and folks in the plane died. Here is the article: http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_15975084

Reading about such accidents seems so surreal when you were witness to them. Its an odd feeling.

Posting from my new setup!

Its been a long time now since I updated this space. We've recently set up a new desktop at home, so here comes a post from and about it..

The new set up is nice - we assembled components for this system at home, starting from a barebone CPU. The order came with the tower, a power supply and a motherboard with the CPU of our choice installed. We ordered it at http://www.portatech.com and they delivered the unit promptly and in good condition.

We ordered the other components separately - some RAM, a 500 GB hard disk, a keyboard and a mouse, a wireless adapter and a DVD drive. The interesting thing this time was learning about SATA; we realized that we needed Sata cables for both the DVD and hard disk drives. This was new to me, since the last time I saw a hard disk, it did not use these cables. Anyway, turns out these cables are pretty nifty and easy to use; no more headaches trying to figure out how to connect the cables ! Amazon.com has been quite nice to review stuff and buy them with free shipping !

Next, we burnt a DVD with Ubuntu's latest and ran it on the new system. Installing was quite a breeze, and I loved how the set up recognized all the hardware comfortably and everything worked so well ! Ubuntu is pretty good to use too.

Some nice points:

We'd ordered a HDTV / monitor from LG, and used that as the display. The resolution being a little large, I was afraid whether it will require special configuration, but no, Ubuntu took care of it by itself !

Sound was next, and we connected our mini Logitech speaker system, so thoughtfully gifted by Sandeep. The sound is quite awesome now !

One other fun part was how nicely our old HP printer works ! We'd replaced the cartridges with newer ones from cartridge world, but windows on our laptops refused to print. We were almost ready to give up and buy something new, but Ubuntu came along and is printing B&W and color merrily!

We haven't missed any Microsoft products so far; Ubuntu seems to have a fairly reasonable alternative to everything we've needed so far. Drivers work well, Open Office works beautifully, the printer and wireless adapter needed no configuration and even VPN got installed like a charm !

My final IT trouble at home was connecting to the office network from Linux; I'd tried to get it working on the older Ubuntu on my laptop, but it just refused. The new Ubuntu liked the Cisco VPN software, and I am enjoying wfh on this fine setup. We were looking at a window on unix inside windows inside unix, and decided this warranted a post!

The best part is switching the display between the computer and TV !

Missing aircraft

My heart goes out to the 200+ people in the Air France jet that went missing over the Atlantic.

Its difficult to believe that in this day and age, the craft cannot be located. Couldn't they start looking in the location from where the last contact was made ?

Isn't the craft supposed to also work as a glider, if it loses power ? One would think there was the chance to land it over the water and get the people out on floating rafts. The cold water would make it crazy, but there is a chance for survival if rescuers reach there quickly enough.

Makes me a little jittery to think that I will be flying out in 10 days time myself, all statistics aside.

Oracle Gym and clever invitations

Our gym's weekly newsletter uses clever ways of keeping the reader entertained and interested in their events. Here is one from today that I found hilarious:

You'll need this info if you cheat on your taxes and have to run from the IRS:
Are you Wearing the Right Running or Walking Shoe?
Wednesday, April 22nd
11:00am - 1:00pm
Club Oracle 1st Floor Weight Room

Erdos number

My Erdos number is 3 !

A friend/labmate of mine from ASU just got her PHd. In a congratulatory exchange of messages, she was recalling our talk of the Erdos number many years ago, and mentioned I am indeed going to be 3 now. Seems that the paper in question has been published. She will, of course, be Erdos 2.

If only our paper was mathematical, it could have been real. Here is my older post on the topic.
Congratulations, Toni !