Fewer and fewer days left...

Hey all,

I only have three days left in Bangalore! Can you believe it? I certainly can't... I have *far* to many things left to do before Friday ends to really believe it.

So, what have I been up to since the last post? I believe the last post was between 2 and 3AM Sunday morning, in the midst of a Harry Potter book (possibly right after or right before a several hour power outage!). Well, I finished Harry Potter at about 7:15AM, not having slept in the meantime (oops... I barely slept at all this week!). After playing on the computer a bit I got about 5 hours of sleep and woke up around noon. I don't really remember what I else I did on Sunday. I know that I went in to work for a little while, and other than that I remember next to nothing! Maybe Rob or someone has some idea... I guess sleep deprivation really does effect your memory. On the plus side, though, I did get sleep Sunday night!

Monday was actually, finally, a good day at work. I spent basically the entire morning speaking to Satya about the pseudorandom number generator (we even forgot about the Lab Sabha and just made it down in time to have the cake [for celebrating August birthdays]). The afternoon was spent in fruitful pursuit of the things we had spoken of in the morning, and then at about 7:15PM Rob, Revi, Udai, and I went with another Microsoft employee named Mike (Redmond based, but visits India a lot and knows Revi) to the paratha place. The parathas were delicious, and we got to listen to Mike and Revi talk about what it was like to work for the actual Microsoft in Redmond through the 90's and early 2000's. It sounded like a completely different place from Microsoft Research in present day. I do a fairly good job of maintaining work/life balance at MSRI, whereas it didn't even sound like that was possible at Microsoft. There were all sort of other, slightly horrifying, stories they had that I don't think I will share here. Despite the stories probably being very biased toward horrifying, it really made me feel like I wouldn't have wanted to work there at all.

After parathas I made a quick (and maybe final!) trip into commercial street to pick up a small gift, then headed home (and again got a decent amount of sleep).

Today has pretty much been all work. I spent from 8:30AM to 10:00PM in the office, but I feel like I got a lot of stuff done and my PRNG implementation is in fairly good shape (and even has an interface now!), and I got to talk to Deba about Imagliazzo and Naor (they have a rather *cool* paper). There were some breaks from work. I played a whole bunch of games of ping-pong today, mostly with Rob, but some with Christian and Ranjita. I'm definitely getting better, and the game is oodles of fun ^_^. A bunch of people also went to New Shanti Sagar for a late lunch / goodbye lunch for interns in the Emerging Markets group (even though some, like Revi, aren't leaving till next week).

I guess thats all for now. Sorry that this has been a somewhat boring blog post, but I'm buckling down and just trying to get work done before my internship is over. Tomorrow is the day of Indian independence from the UK, which is apparently a fairly quiet day of contemplation (it also marks the anniversary of the very bloody and violent partition between India and Pakistan). We aren't supposed to go into work, but I'm going to have to in order to get things done.

Cheers,
Jason