I have the best friends

I came home this evening from work and found a box from Amazon.com! A big surprise, of course! I quickly opened it to find “The Beak of the Finch” by Jonathan Weiner, sent to me as a gift from Rebecca!

This book (already added to my allconsuming.net list on the right) is a book I’ve been wanting to read for years. I first came across a copy in a bookstore back when I was still an undergrad student. The price was beyond what I could afford then but I made up my mind that I had to read the book. I never did find it again (in a library or elsewhere) and so I was always recommending the book to friends without ever having read it myself! And now finally I can and goddamn! I’ve been right to recommend this book! 😀

Oh, I didn’t really say what the book was about, did I? Well, on the Galapagos islands, where Darwin collected many specimens on his voyage on the Beagle, are found 13 species of finches (also known as Darwin’s finches as he was the first person to collect the specimens.) Now due to the weirdness (even to a biologist) of island biogeography, populations of animals and plants on islands like this evolve at a fairly quick rate. Therefore a detailed, systematic study of any such population should give you all the real data to show evolution on the march! And that is what “The Beak of the Finch” documents along with a very well written exposition on Darwin’s theory with all the requisite history to fill in the spaces.

Read this book!

Outsourced humour

For being so totally lazy and not updating this blog, even though I promised, I’m trying to make up by posting this little comic I found on my hard disk while cleaning up sundry folders.

Jokes about outsourcing, holidays, Americans, Indians, Bush, what more do you want? 🙂

(Click the thumbnail for the full size version)

Gifts!

As a goodbye gift, Heidi sent me two magazines of puzzles to occupy me on the airplane, a bag of Jelly Beans (I love them!) and some sleazy postcards… Well, cheesy at least! 😉 There’s also a mystery book wrapped up which I’m not supposed to open until my birthday!

Rebecca sent me the DVDs of the Lord of the Rings movies!! Simply awesome… I’ve watched them all again in my last week here. 🙂

Shivanee & Chhavi put up with me being cranky for almost a week, that’s also a cool gift. hehe! (They also fed me well :p)

Gauri drove me all the way to Chicago.. (I had to put up with her being cranky then 😉 )

*sniff* Thanks, you guys!

Going home…

I leave for India on a flight this afternoon out of Chicago.

After months of agonising (and not posting anything here either) I finally made the decision to leave grad school and go home to India. This was something I considered as far back as last summer, but a bunch of meetings over three days with the Director of Grad Studies at my dept. convinced me otherwise and he also told me to explore options with other depts. I did and found a dept. and a lab willing to take me in and that I was interested in.

A year of mostly no work but lots of interesting new things followed. Which also included me teaching in a classroom regularly and having a great deal of fun doing it too! But alas it was not to be. For sundry reasons I find myself deciding I’m better off out of grad school for a bit and looking for a job. I can’t stay in America unless I am in school, so I have to go home.

The 20th of this month was the last day I spent in East Lansing. I spent the day finishing up sundry chores and doing a little shopping. In the evening I met up with some friends at the Peanut Barrel. It was a happy-sad occassion. In fact I feel a bit sad writing about it now.

I got home later that night and had a ton of laundry to do. And of course pack my myriad books and comics for shipping the next day! I ended up not doing the packing and catching a few hours of sleep.

The 21st morning was spent in a frenzy of packing and sealing and clearing out my closets. My friend arrived to pick me up later and helped quite a bit. We spent ages at the post office trying to ship the books back to India and I think it was past 1pm when it was all done.

We drove to Chicago right after that. My friends in Chicago were annoyed since I promised them I would be in town by afternoon and they had great plans for the afternoon and evening. Taking me to the beach, out to a club, etc.

I have spent the past week, mostly just faffing around here, meeting people, taking walks in the evenings (Oak Park is a beautiful neighbourhood.) I also found a book sale and quickly snaffled up a copy of Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” for just about $4.

Yesterday, I walked over to a local cinema and watched a sub-titled version of “Hero.” This is absolutely the best Chinese martial arts film I have ever seen.

Earlier this morning, I went to the post office and mailed off a box of my Groo comics and also my phone to A in Maryland… sigh, I’m going to miss that phone too! 🙁

Happy Birthday!!

This blog is 1 year old today! Yayy!!

/me throws streamers in the air

Much has happened in one year both to me and to this blog. The changes in the blog are quite evident. From the dowdy hard to navigate page it was last year, and rare updates, it has changed to the snazzy, still hard to navigate and still rare updates. 😉 Well the updating part I hope to change with a flurry of posts over the next few days and weeks. And those posts will explore a little of what has been happening in my life! To use a violent metaphor, I’ll be killing two birds with one stone. So there.

And kicking!

Just to keep people updated… To that non-existent group of people that actually are subscribed to my feed, the link has now changed to http://oook.freeshell.org/atom.xml.

Looking at my blog page, there’s just so much to do! And it’s really hard when you don’t even have the luxury of using your own computer. I’m actually typing this out on a clunky Celeron 266MHz powered machine. Yep. You read that right. 266MHz. Dinosaur. And more about dinosaurs in later posts. (wait for them!)

My sidebar is badly formatted and terribly out of date. At least with the currently reading list. I probably have to update my blogroll links too. Hopefully the Flickr Zeitgeist is working for everyone. Ain’t it cool? 🙂

I’m gonna post this with the date of August 5th too, just to keep things consistent. Well, consistent to me, at least. You can go get confused. (For those who like these random factoids, today is actually the 1st of September!)

Right-ho… time to click that post button!

It’s alive!!

And just like that, it’s updated again. I’m going to start posting a bunch of back-dated entries. Starting with this one dated August 5th, for no other reason than that it’s my mom’s birthday and I love her very much! (awww! Isn’t that sweet? ;))

A lot has happened since then, and as I write more entries, those of you not in the know, will soon be!

I need to seriously overhaul this blog. I was busy trying to redesign it when I stopped writing. At the same time I was planning a move to some free webspace that I was graciously given by Hanni which has since gone.

So, lets just call this a little hiccup in the life of this blog and move on, ok?

I’m baaaaackkk!!

GMail ads

Just some funny stuff I see as ads when I use GMail.

This set of ads I get when I’m viewing the introductory email from Google. Talk about advertising yourself! 😉 What’s also funny is the related pages section, one of the pages is returning a 404, but that doesn’t faze Google. hehehe..

And this was when I was viewing another mail which mentioned “GMail” in the text a couple of times. Google really believes in fair play, don’t they? 😉