Travel Advisory

Never ever ever ever travel Greyhound. You are guaranteed to be
1) Cold
2) Very Late
3) All those things that come from being cold and late e.g. irritable, sleep deprived etc etc.
Why am I ranting like this?
I took this greyhound from Champaign Illinois to Rochester, New York with connections at Chicago and Cleveland.
1) The bus to Chicago got delayed. I missed my 8:45PM connection to Cleveland.
2) I got a 2:30 AM connection to Cleveland. This thing breaks down in the middle of the highway in the dead of the might in the middle of a freezing snowstorm.The drive dude HAD to turn off the engine and the heating. Which meant that the occupants were freezing for the better part of the night. Then our man gets it up to a gas station where yours truly had to wait for another 3 hours for a replacement bus.
Final Result: 12 hours late, Cold, Tired and Ranting

Memories...

Today I got an email from my tennis team partner in IIT telling me about inter-IIT. It's next week in IIT-Madras. It's coming here after 4 years. It was here the year before I joined IIT and it is back the year after I leave!
All of a sudden I am getting back all kinds of memories- this is the first time in a long time that I am not playing in inter-IIT. Memories of endless practice session in the sun, getting up bleary eyed on my Kinetic and running to the insti-courts,coming back dead and having those naps you can have only when you are dead, traveling in the train to the host IIT, staying in the hostel, cheering the other teams, having strat sessions, sitting back after the game and lazing around with friends...endless list of things..some of the happiest moments of my time in IIT. Arrgghh..you know what..if someone gave me an offer to chuck all this crap and rewind time and get back to IIT. I will take it!

Minnessota Trip and More

I spent thanksgiving week in Minn. with KP. Jigar had also come along. We had a great time- went to a basketball game, went to a riverdance show, watched Veer Zara the new SRK movie and more. It was good to get away from all the work and come back refreshed. I also saw a good amount of snow. The first since I came to the US. Well, now its back to work.I cant wait for the 18th. Thats when the semester end. I plan to go to NY to spend a week with Arrvindh. We plan to make a 'university tour' of NY. Rent out a car and drive around basically. Then,I leave for India on the 25th. It's going to be good to be back home- no worries, no work, no cooking, no taking care of myself, friends, family of course..I can go on forever!

The IBM T42-One Amazing Laptop

The IBM T42 is the best laptop I have ever come across. I bought a 15" version with1.8 Ghz, 80GB , 512 MB RAM . It has a fingerprint reader which replaces any kind of log on screen. The reader works pretty well too! The screen is good. It has a 64MB ATI Radeon Graphics Card. It's light, about 5.7 lbs. That's way lighter than other models with the same config. Sony's starts at 7lbs! It's fast. The HDD runs at 7200 RPM which makes large programs load quickly. The frame seems sturdy and capable of putting up with hard use.
The only downside is that it's expensive. Costed about 2800$. It didnt matter for me because I was buying it for my dad and his company would be paying for it. It would be possible to get a toned down version for about 1800$. Maybe less. But it would still be a couple of hundred dollars more expensive than comparable configs from other vendors. But, I feel its worth it.

Emotional Skills 110

Getting angry/sarcastic/bitter is pointless.
a) It helps in no way to make the situation better.
b) You cause a lot of damage to yourself and to those around you.
c) It makes you feel good. So, you might say why not lose your temper. But, you are getting cheated here. You stop thinking about the damage you cause after your high. Now you need to repair the original situation and the damage you did when you lost it. More work.
=>Either solve the situation or accept it.

'Life In General'

'Life in General' has now become a little depressing. Mainly because I dont seem to be doing anything apart from sitting in the lab and sitting at home. I really should be going out and doing stuff. But it's get dark at 5! And, yes it's also cold and wet!
Can't wait to take my Thanksgiving break! Get out of the system for a week. When I return, it's just going to be a couple of weeks before I take a flight back home! Don't need to - cook, worry about food, worry about money, worry about anything actually!

My Work

I am posting after a long time. Its more because I had not much to write. Been pretty busy with my work and otherwise just lazing around. Not really been into anything 'cool' as such. Or atleast something someone will want to read about.
On a more serious note, I shall write a bit about my work. Now, I have shifted to Computational Biology. As people have started sequencing genes on a massive scale the question of effectively analyzing the data comes into the picture. I am currently working on 2 topics-
1) Phylogenetic Trees- Ways to construct the evolutionary tree of a bunch of sequences.
2) Microarray Data Analyses- There are now ways to analyze how the genes of an organism produce RNA and finally proteins under a wide number of conditions very efficeintly. Analysis of this data can help understand similarities between different types of genes.
I need to know some amount of molecular biology. I plan to take courses in the coming semesters. Once I understand the problem, it boils down to math, mostly statistical modeling and a mix of graph theory and algorithms.
The work is fun as the final result of whatever I do has potential to be relevant scientifically. I kind of never liked Computer Science, I just liked the math. This looks an ideal alternative for me, as I work in pure science without actually working in pure science. I havent been so excited about what I do, since my JEE days when I used to love my maths, physics and chemistry. Now, I am learning biology, something I dont know much about but which I find fascinating.

Webpage

Well I have created my homepage on the UIUC website. Here it is-
http://netfiles.uiuc.edu/aramani2/www/frame.html