letting go...

I learnt an important lesson today about letting go.

When drinking soda, you know there's an unpleasant fuzzy feeling in your throat and your nose. Today I learnt that it's actually more pleasant to let go and burp out loud rather than holding it in.

My new bike

So here I am in Michigan State. Small city, beautiful campus.

I bought a bike, because,.. well because I wanted to. So I bought one secondhand cheap. I bought a bike that has been impounded by the police then sold to the public because the owner abandoned it.

I bought mine for $10.
I needed a lock for it, and the lock cost me $14
furthermore the chains were rusted $7
the saddle was so small it hurts $21
And a wrench to put the saddle on $6



so $48 dollars for a $10 bike :)

But it's a good bike. I ride it to campus, a 10-15 minutes ride. A lot of people ride bikes to campus. There are bike posts everywhere to lock your bike. It's funny because here people ride their bikes on the sidewalk, and nobody ever wear a helmet.

Bye bye pittsie....

Leaving pittsburgh for Michigan state in a couple of weeks. Books are packed, ready to go :). clothes are still out, obviously, since I need to wear them until I go :D

I'll miss pittsburgh's city scene. The skyline. The beautiful mt washington view. I'm not sure I'll get that same view in East Lansing :).


Took some pictures of the smithfield bridge yesterday. The smithfield bridge is I think the most beautiful bridge in pittsburgh. It's one of the oldest too. Took picture of another bridge (fort pitt bridge I think it's called).



On the right of the bridge is the science center and the football stadium where the Pittsburgh Steelers Play.

Another interesting aspect of pittsburgh, which I've heard a lot but never actually seen is the "singing fountain". The fountain sprays according to the song that is played. This fountain is in front of the hard rock cafe of the station square

If a picture is worth 1000 words, then 5000 pictures...

You may know that I'm into photography. I have a nice digital SLR. Two lenses, tripod, a couple of filters. Heck, I even enrolled in a mail based distance learning photography course.

Photography, is a way for me to balance my life. Don't get me wrong, I love programming, and the opposite of programming is photography. The language minded of you would protest that vehemently I know. Here's how I see it however, in programming we create things, software. We stay inside all day, not getting the sun on our skin. The sun is bad, it makes the screen harder to see. Photography is the opposite, it's more about capturing than creating. I like to do it outside, where the sun shines. So you see, it balances things out.

It's not that I don't like my computer. It's my favourite lifeless object in the world :D. Life needs balance and this is it.

Anyway, back to the story. Yesterday I moved all my pictures to DVD's. It took 4 DVD's to save 1 year of pictures. That's quite a number of pictures, 5000 pictures in all. 5000. Now that storage is no problem. My next quest will be to categorize them. All 5000 of them. I'm also using picasa
(
) as my photo album, it's a pretty good software, which lets you organize as well as do basic editing on your pictures.

Some of the pictures I've taken can be seen at:

• My homepage album


• Deviant Art


• Yahoo album

I've also been using a film SLR these last few days. i took 36 pictures before realizing, that I didn't insert the film properly into the roller. Therefore, the first frame of the film was exposed 36 times.... :(

Graduation at Carnegie Mellon University 

Butterfly at Phipps 

Ice cream

It's spring time. Also almost the end of the term. Finally :). Tomorrow is the last final, on wednesday it's the last project day :). Then it's 3 months of research, and then I'm off to Michigan (I've been accepted as a PhD student in Michigan State University).

This picture is me enjoying pittsburgh. Just sitting on the cathedral of learning lawn eating ice cream and reading comics (borrowed from the Carnegie Library :) )

The Talking Bus Driver

There is one bus driver that stands out among other Pittsburgh's bus drivers. He's on the 71A route (the route I take to go to campus) and passes my house at 10.30.

Why does he stand out? He talks. Bus driver's are not normally known for their eloquence. They don't say much unless spoken to. They probably would yell out the name of the stop "Center and neville", or a few grunts, the nicer ones says "Have a nice day", and some other I know says "pay when you get off".

This driver is different. This driver likes to talk. He doesn't talk personally to one person or make jokes or anything like that. He says the same things as other drivers but in a more elegant fashion. For example, instead of saying "Fifth and Craig", he would say something like "Fifth and craig, PNC bank, The diocese, access to pittsburgh blind...". He would also say "Please don't leave your things on the buses, gloves, hats... and please be careful out there folks. Beware of traffic look left and right for incoming traffic".

He has a nice voice, although I don't know how he doesn't get a sore throat after talking like that non stop. Lozenges I suspect.

So many blogs, so little time

I've just added a couple more blogs to my blogging collecction. Work related, all of them. The first one is my research blog which can be accessed at the pitt server. The research blog contains the trials and adulation I face as a researcher. Most of it is just outlining my work, also what I did today. Is a research blog a good idea? Probably not. People can see that I've been slacking off, also people can steal my ideas huh. Hmmm. The only good thing about it is that I hope to get more comments, more ideas, and also some justification for some of the (bad :) ) choices that I made.

Another blog is on my computer. This blog is not for public viewing. It's just a blog for the projects that i am doing. Basically I want to read it in the future and see.. Wow I've really gone quite far.