All I ever do is catch up

Hmm, another month rolling to an end and it looks like this is very well going to be my last entry for this month. And to think that there used to be a time when I would actually document religiously, everything I did every single day of my life for nearly two and a half years ! Me thinks that some of it most certainly has to do with the fact that I seem to have stopped thinking in general

Anyhow, it’s been 2 weeks since my trip to Chicago which turned out to be a most delightful little getaway. On the drive to Chicago, Vidya and I managed to keep ourselves reasonably entertained with a number of things.

For one, there was good music from my collection (including the Hindi music stuff I bought in India this time). Two, Vidya suddenly decided that she wanted to understand how the Internet worked and how networks in general could be designed hierarchically without having to be conceived all the way from the top (the bottom-up design, basically) so I spent a good length of time getting her to see the big picture. Three (and this was the most geeky), we decided that nothing could possibly be a greater exercise for our tired brains than to figure out, in our heads, the ratio of the engine’s RPM to the wheels’ RPM when my Corolla was cruising at 75 mph So we dug out the car’s manual, determined the radius of the Corolla’s wheels, calculated the circumference, determined the speed of the car, got to the RPM of the wheels and all in SI units (I can’t do engineering calculations in FPS, sorry) and finally arrived at the answer : ~ 1 ! So what that means, my friend (and I am addressing my good friend and faithful pupil nOnda here), is that when your car is in its top-gear, the engine rotates at a speed almost equal to that of the tyre ! Not bad for a calculation done entirely in our heads (although this was responsible for slight veering off the lane when processing happened in Vidya’s brain!)

The weekend was most relaxed – we played mini-golf on Saturday evening. In the night, we have some friends over and the night saw a good game of literature and blackjack (which I am hooked to, by the way). On Sunday we played tennis by the lake. After going on for ever with Rohit, I finally surrendered my racquet to Priya and wandered away to watch Karan (Vidya’s nephew) play with the slide and the swing and have such an awesome time (as were some of the other kids around him). Being there watching all those little bundles of joy laugh and play made me happy in a way I can’t describe. There is so much beauty in life

So here I am catching up with things in general. Or should I say life? Catching up with people, phone calls, my blog, my email, my parents, my brother, my projects, assignments, exams … the list goes on

This week I also happen to be in complete awe of LaTeX and before I end this post, let me tell you how I think it is simply the best typesetting and document preparation package out there. Period. Sadly, it isn’t quite something I can give to the average user and expect to be productive with. Well, it is sad that the world can’t all be as smart as us computer scientists. Tch, tch.