Fun times

Wow, its been a while since I've posted! The main reason for this is that Tuesday night I became addicted to the old SNES game "Bust-a-Move". Basically it is vaugly like Tetris: you shoot colored bubbles at already established bubbles and try to eliminate all the bubbles before the ceiling crushes you. Fun and addictive, I played through *60* levels on Tuesday night, then the remaining 40 Wednesday night. I am now, however, done and can get back to things like reading and posting to this blog! I'm going to be careful before I start any more video games this summer. ^_^

So, what has happened in the last few days? Work first. I am making progress on my project to build a pseudorandom number generator. I *finally* understand the error correcting code that I am using (it is _really_ simple, but I didn't realize this until Abishek explained how it worked to me. Much nicer than reading and rereading a confusing paper over and over ^_^). Wednesday and this morning I got a basic, and essentially non-random, version working. I know understand what I'm doing though, so I spent a couple of hours sketching out a design, and this afternoon I rewrote all of the code. It is now all pretty and nice, and tomorrow will consist of stitching a few last bits together and beginning actual experimentation to see what sorts of things we need to do to actually get the generator to work. Also, I am getting used to Venkie and really like him. He is crazy and he is awesome. The very definition of crazy awesome. He is a character. He gave a mini-lecture on expander graphs today, just because he felt like it. It was very cool ^_^.

Plenty of things have been going on other than work. Tracy, Christian, and I left work a little early yesterday and took a rickshaw down to MG road. We basically just wandered through bookstores for a few hours (^_^), spending most of our time in "Blossom", the bookstore I have mentioned a few times previously and *really* like. I ended up buying, based on recommendations from Elaine (who has yet to let me down ^_^), "Song of Solomon" and "Pride and Prejudice". I'm trying to blow through a number of classics this summer (currently reading "Catch-22"). While we were on MG road we also found a money exchange that takes travelers checks (finally) and browsed around a pretty cool music/movies shop. I need to find some India movies that have subtitles so that I can see what they're like!

The other recent major thing happened tonight. I came home a little late, had an early dinner, then met Nels, Ashwani, Prasad, Ranjita, and Christian at Opus for quiz night again. We could only have 4 people on a team so we broke up into team west: Nels, Christian, and myself and team east: Ashwani, Prasad, and Ranjita. They did a bit better than we did, but neither of us performed terribly well tonight. We did have a great time though! I had a couple of beers and just enjoyed chatting with everyone there when we weren't beating our heads against a wall trying to answer the questions ^_^.

After we left Opus we dropped off Ranjita and were heading back to the office to disperse when Ashwani (who was driving) decided to take us to a place he knows of for food. This place turned out to be about 15 kilometers out of Bangalore and consisted of a number of *horribly sketchy* shacks on the side of the road. One of the big draws of the place is the fact that it is outside of Bangalore, so it can serve alcohol after 11:30PM (though we didn't get any while we were there). We sat and chatted (and ate _delicious_ food) about random things. Apparently there is a very big rave scene all around India. I also found out that after Israelis do their mandatory stint in the military they tend to take a vacation and spend like 8 months in India (Europe & the US are too expensive). This is such a common thing that there are small communities that have been built up. They are also not well liked because these communities let them stay a bit above the local culture, which can grate against people they come into contact with.

We just got back a little bit ago. As Ashwani said tonight had "Good fun, good food, good drinks, good music, and good company". It was a good night ^_^. Its kinda cool having a nightlife and learning what big cities are like for the first time in a foreign country ^_^.

Thats all for now folks. I need to sleep!

Cheers,
Jason