Bangalore, Day 3

Again I slept in 3 hour chunks and woke up early. We were only given breakfast for two (I guess the guy didn’t realize there are 3 people here now), compacted rice cakes with a soup-looking thing to pour over it, that were fairly good. Nels and I tried to catch an auto-rickshaw at 10:00, but that was rush hour and we only were able to stop two, neither of with would take us to Microsoft just on the meter (usually you have to try something like 6-10 auto-rickshaws before you can find one that will take you where you want to go on the meter). We ended up walking backing and taking a cab, that was sent by Microsoft, to go to the office.

At the office I met another intern, a lady whose name I’m still blanking on, Ravi or something like that, who is a friend of President Klawe’s and had been directed to look out for Tracy and I. She is quite a character. She worked for Microsoft for something like 10 years before Klawe convinced her to go back to school to get her PhD, which is what she is doing now. She has most recently been spending some time in Africa working on a research project and accumulating stories (such as having her shoes stolen off of her feet while sleeping on a train).

I really didn’t get much done today. I spent a while talking with Satya (who may be my research mentor) about India and about possible research topics. I need to talk to him more tomorrow because the first topic that I’m looking into seems far too much like last summer’s work and not nearly math-y enough for me :-). I also got to introduce myself to everyone at Microsoft Research India at a meeting (just a brief introduction, so not too bad, “Hi I’m Jason, here’s where I’m from, here’s what I do, anyone who likes frisbee should come chat with me…”). I also went to a talk by a professor from one of the IIT’s that is currently visiting and has had many of the researchers as students. The talk was on randomized incremental algorithms and was quite interesting.

Getting home from work proved to be a bit of a challenge. The new apartment is not really within walking distance of MSRI, so we need to wait for taxis. This took about an hour after Nels called that, in which time I worked a little, chatted with people, and got online just a bit. I really hope that we have internet in our rooms tomorrow!

Once we got back we just had dinner, called the housing person and bitched about things like not having internet (which is supposed to be in by tomorrow now… was going to be today. That is one thing I am learning, is that *everything* takes longer than they say here and is highly inefficient. We were told that the cab we asked for would come in 10 minutes and it took an hour, just as an example), and chatted with each other. Now its time for be, as I’m exhausted and am getting up early for work.

Cheers,

Jason