A trip to MG road with Dad

Hey all,

After that last, massive, post I'm going to try to make this one a bit shorter. Not too much happened this morning. I slept in a bit till 8:00. Revi came by in the morning because someone at work had decided it was sari (formal wear for the Indian female) day today and Revi and Tracy dressed up in their saries. I got to chat with the two of them, in the full formal wear, while wearing a towel, which was amusing.

I had a very productive morning at work, writing up some thoughts in a new area I'm working on a bit (adversarial learning on CRFs). I was going to meet Dad at noon, but at about 11:30 Venkie IMed me asking how things were going. This eventually resulted in me staying an extra hour trying to code in a change that he had suggested to the pseudo-random number generator. Probably the most irksome part of all of this was after I sent him the first copy of the writeup on the algorithms, to which he replied "I can't read this. Have you ever heard of pseudo-code? Its this thing called 'pseudo-code' " which was a bit of slap in the face and very hard to swallow. However, I had no choice but to rewrite the file to his satisfaction and then try to make the changes he suggested. Anyways, around 1:00 I finally got out and Dad and I went to pizza hut and tried again to set up his cell phone (in vain). After the *delicious* meal at pizza hut we came back to the office, arranged transportation down to the Tibetan camp Bylakuppe for tomorrow, grabbed Tracy, and headed down to MG road!

It was definitely a fun afternoon. This was Dad's first trip in an auto-rickshaw, which is certainly a new experience, and one really impossible to describe (especially in heavy Bangalore traffic). Once we got to MG road we toured around a few places, the cat (really magazine) store, my favorite bookshop, the Planet M music store, and a couple of stores selling neat Indian goods (I bought a few gifts ^_^). After all that shopping we took a break at a resturant on the 3rd story of a building overlooking the milling masses of Brigade Road, sat, and chatted. After that nice break we attempted to find Gerudo mall, which I had been to about 5 weeks ago, but were unable to find our way there and were fairly tired so we hopped in an rickshaw back to Sadashivanagar(where I live).

Funny story from the drive back: our rickshaw was stopped in traffic and there was a bus diagonally in front of it with some space behind (right next to our rickshaw). A guy on a motorcycle drove into that space, and while he was still slowly drifting forward started staring at us. This guy had his neck cranked around 90 degrees! However, while he was staring at us, he kept drifting forward on the motorcycle and smacked the front of the bike right into the back of the bus! He wasn't hurt at all, just startled, and all of us and the rickshaw driver had a good chuckle at him. He was too distracted by all the white people to notice where he was going!

Dad went home for a while and I worked for a bit (after we tried to get his phone worked out again and the people asked for an additional *two days* to get his phone unlocked :-P), then we walked down to Opus with Nels and Rob. Rob split off to go home once we got there, but Dad, Nels, and I had a really nice time at Opus (good music, good drinks, good food, good people ^_^). We did not participate in Booze & Brains (quiz night) this week, but the main waiter actually recognized us as Thursday night regulars! :-). I guess we've established quite the tradition.

After Opus we headed home, and Dad and I will meet tomorrow at about 11:30AM to get picked up by a cab and drive ~250km to Bylakuppe! Should be a cool trip! Since I've been home I've just been futzing on the blog (and talking to Elaine! Yay! She gets here in14 days, and I *cannot wait*!). Now I should *really* get to sleep, so thats all for now!

Cheers,
Jason